HSE experts tried to find growth areas for innovative products

The first attempts by experts from the Higher School of Economics to process statistical data on innovation in Russian industry immediately showed two systemic problems of two groups of Russian companies with different innovation activities. Thus, high shares of innovative products are largely explained by the concentration of state support, but its excess leads to the fact that enterprises are poorly market oriented and less efficient in the production of technologies. A group of enterprises with a low share of innovation, on the contrary, works with traditional sales markets and is not ready to spend their resources searching for new solutions and taking risks in pursuit of demand.

The Institute of Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge at the Higher School of Economics made an attempt to find growth points in the volume of innovative products by processing an array of statistical data on manufacturing industries for 2022. In just one year, enterprises produced innovative goods, works and services worth 3.8 trillion rubles—7% of their annual sales volume. The majority of companies (94%) independently developed innovative products for the market, but the volume of these innovations in monetary terms is not indicated. At the same time, government orders (394.8 billion rubles) and direct state support for innovation (189.2 billion rubles) are concentrated in several industries, such as the production of aircraft and spacecraft, ships, ships and boats, computers and finished metal products.

The authors identified two industry groups of companies with different intensity of production of innovative products. The first included companies with a share of such products at the level of 7.2–28.1%, which is noticeably higher than the average for manufacturing industries. Companies in this group are engaged in the production of aircraft and equipment (28.1% of innovations), the construction of ships and vessels (23.7%), the production of computers, electronic and optical products (22%), as well as metal products, transport and equipment. The group’s high results are directly related to the amount of state support for companies’ innovative activities. The authors warn, however, that the traditional focus on obtaining government orders may entail a weak orientation of products to the open market and a lack of understanding of real needs and demand. Combined with insufficient attention to marketing research, separation from the market can lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of innovation, which raises the question of the effectiveness of state support against the backdrop of government plans to increase its scale many times due to the loss of access to foreign technologies.

The second group consists of companies with a low and near-zero share of innovative products (0.5–6.6%). The demand for such products here is low, both from the state and from users. The companies themselves do not have incentives for innovative activity, since they prefer to work in traditional markets. Only a third of enterprises in this group consider innovative development as an opportunity to expand sales markets. They are recommended to develop, among other things, process innovations related to the introduction of marketing methods.

The data show that the state and market demand for innovation in the Russian Federation are noticeably different: the state demand (formal and long-term) is satisfied much more intensively than the market demand (real and rapidly changing), while the state demand is limited in volume and carries the risk of losing the adequacy of decisions made in companies and losing the market . The share of companies capable of adapting to changes in market demand in the Russian Federation is small. It is likely that, to a large extent, this difference between the two groups of industries is due to a historical trend: stimulating the state’s demand for innovation began in the early 2010s under President Dmitry Medvedev, who insisted on introducing mandatory requirements to increase the share of innovative procurement by state-owned companies. State-owned companies themselves have repeatedly said that the requirements of innovative development programs have to be fulfilled formally, ensuring that purchased goods and services meet the criteria of innovation.

Diana Galieva, Oleg Sapozhkov