Current state of innovative activities in the Russian regions

Introduction. At the current stage of economic development, Russia’s focus on competitive performance and technological leadership in international markets has boosted the role of innovations. In recent years, a number of policy documents have been adopted; they outline the ways to ensure the transition of the Russian economy to an innovative development path and list the indicators of attainment of pre-defined priorities. The paper presents a comparative study of the Russian regions in terms of their attainment of innovative development targets aimed at the achievement of national strategic goals. Materials and methods. The authors used open statistical data on innovations in the Russian Federation, published by the Federal State Statistics Service for 2015 and 2020. Statistical methods and cluster analysis were employed to make a comparative analysis using Statistica and MS Excel software. Results. The Russian regions were clustered in the course of the study, and each cluster was characterized by various aspects of innovative activities. Primary statistics were used to calculate relative indicators of effectiveness of innovative activities. Various statistical charts were used to visualize the results. The studies allow assessing changes in the composition and structure of clusters during the period under review. Calculations were made to assess the degree of achievement of goals set in the “Strategy for Innovative Development of the Russian Federation”. The authors also consider current approaches to innovative activity rankings made for the Russian regions. Conclusions. The results acknowledge that the level of innovative development is low in the majority of the Russian regions, that have inadequate systems of indicators and calculation methods, used to characterize innovative activities. Development of innovative activity evaluation methods, aimed at promoting innovative activities in the regions and rising the efficiency of investments in innovations, are proposed as promising areas of further research.