Innovative Infrastructure as a Factor of Inter-Regional Differentiation in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the monitoring and evaluating of regional innovation infrastructure. The final aim of creating a separate field of organizational infrastructure elements is achieved by a sequential construction of regional market-oriented infrastructure systems working on the network principle. The paper presents a catalogue of regional innovation infrastructural elements, their key characteristics and an approach to assess the performance. Moreover timeline of the creation of innovative infrastructure elements is presented, regions and federal districts, with the greatest opportunities for the realization of innovative projects, as well as the most lagging regions are highlighted. The authors conclude that priority of an asymmetrical regional development leads to increasing disparities in regional development. Key risks of the asymmetrical regional development are economic and social disparities between the regions, labor migration to innovations leading regions increasing the load on the budgets of donor regions, the growth of social tension. However, theoretically, in the long term, development of the region-innovative leaders can become a driver for developing economy as a whole. But there is no evidence of this so far. The authors propose setting up a centralized strategic monitoring system to assess effectiveness and efficiency of the innovation infrastructure elements.
The article is based on the results of the general research of the Russian Federation subdevisions to determine the presence and characteristics of the elements of the innovation infrastructure.It was conducted in March-May 2016.