Infrastructure of Innovation Systems: Application of International and Russian Experience in Moscow

We live in an era where the global transformation of the world is influenced by the latest technology and products, leading to impairment of the existing material and technical resource base, lower competitiveness of traditional economic sectors andredistribution of financial and resource flows. Countries that can effectively create and develop large-scale high-tech businesses will significantly increase their influence on global processes and maintain their economic independence. Russia faces the challenge of building a competitive innovation ecosystem in which high- tech companies will emerge and scale. Unfortunately, there has been no technological or innovative breakthrough in our country in recent years, which is evidenced by the Global Innovation Index where Russia ranks 47th. Russia has a well-developed infrastructure for supporting scientific, technical and innovative projects. This leads to the problem of disunity and lack of careful monitoring of the further development of an SME or a startup that received state support. The inefficiency of the existing system of support for innovative projects is proven by the share of innovative products: it remains at the 2010 level - 6%, when, according to forecasts, it should have been 25% by 2020. The capital, on the contrary, is growing in terms of innovative development and increasing the attractiveness of the city for science-based companies. For instance, Moscow ranked 8th in terms of innovation development, according to the Startup Ecosystem rating. Innovation Cities Global Index showed that Moscow rose to 38th place in the global index in 2019, which is 10 positions higher than last year’s results. Despite this positive dynamic, Moscow lags far behind other cities leading in the Innovation Cities Global Index rate in scientific and technological development. In the capital, as in Russia as a whole, there is a well- developed infrastructure to support innovative projects. The multiplicity of elements of the existing infrastructure creates assumptions of their systematization in order to increase the efficiency of their activities by combining, connecting, integrating, and merging these elements into a single system, due to the emergence of the resulting system. The aim of the thesis was to analyse the current situation and growth prospects of the infrastructure for supporting innovative companies and projects in Moscow and to form a list of proposals for systematisation of this infrastructure in Moscow. For this purpose, the following tasks were performed: analysis of foreign and domestic experiences in building effective innovative system; analysis of the infrastructure for supporting innovative projects in Moscow: strengths, weaknesses and growth prospects have been identified. The outcome document includes a list of recommendations on how to improve the efficiency of the innovation ecosystem of Moscow and Russia as a whole.