Measuring Effects of Economic Crisis on the Firm-Level Innovation Activities

Financial crisis is a tremendous shock for the businesses and it has a huge effect on companies’ innovation activity. Crisis impacts can differ substantially across countries, types of businesses and types of innovation. According to OECD (2012), there are at least three various scenarios on the crises and innovation. Thus, there are many empirical papers, which investigate innovative activity of different types of firms from different countries in times of crisis. However, the subject of the reaction of companies to current crises in Russia has not been studied yet. The main task of this work is to analyze the companies’ reaction in terms of innovation activities to the crisis in Russia. The main task can be implemented by following subtasks. First, to identify the key factors, which have influenced innovation performance during the crisis and main directions of changing in innovation activities using literature analysis. Next to analyze the response to the crisis, depending on the types of companies and their various indicators implicating correspondence analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and clustering of the monitoring data. The final stage is to interpret results that will be done based on the correspondence maps. As the results of study, the dependence between the effects on the enterprise's innovative activity due to crisis and different enterprise's indicators such as numbеr of employeеs, share of innovative sales, share of the cost of innovation, markets related to development and Effects of recent changes in the socio-economic and political situation in Russia was identified. The results of such analysis could help to identify structural weaknesses and strengths in national innovation systems which is the ultimate purpose of this study and as a consequence to improve instruments of innovation policy in response to the crisis in Russia.