State policy on innovation, techno-lobbyism and interest groups
This is an article on the issues with implementing state innovational policy within the context of conflict between the main players in the sphere of innovation, represented by the fields of business, education and science. Special attention is paid to the conflict of interest occurring throughout the process of developing, producing and commercializing technological innovations. As for the theoretical-methodological basis for this study, it consists of clauses which consider innovational activity to be a complex phenomenon, it including relations and interests of various nature, as well as strategies for their implementation. Highlighted is the presence of hidden conservative strategies caused by inequality and instability in terms of how interest groups stand in relation to the government and government institutions. The empirical basis consists of results from 90 interviews with Russian experts (conducted in 2016-2018): this fact defines the relevance, novelty and experimental nature of the study. It is revealed that those parties which partake in innovational activity are inclined more towards collaborating with government institutions than with one another, which explains the dominant role of the state in growing and developing the innovational environment. The government's main partners at this particular stage of implementing innovation policy are corporations: it is considered that they are the ones able to increase the economy's and society's receptiveness of innovations, to overcome the innovation sphere's open state via combining scattered resources and incorporating more science into the production process. The results of specific innovation projects primarily depend on the degree of government involvement in the innovation process at any given stage, from financing a project to government contracts. It is revealed that lobbying technological innovations has a certain peculiarity to it, as in high levels of risk when it comes to development, transfer and commercial implementation. Therefore, value is gained by such aspects of lobbying activity as prediction, analysis and expert evaluation. Indicated is the fact that, in most cases, “shadow lobbying” compensates the poor quality of government management, by basically funding risks associated with executive decisions, not those associated with developing and producing technological innovations. Innovation activity also promotes the institutionalization of techno-lobbying, actualizing its expert-analytical and predictive functions.