Article
Understanding the heterogeneity of innovation modes: Performance effects, barriers, and demand for state support
This study explores the potential of the innovation modes, a firm-level taxonomy of innovation behavior, to provide a reasonable treatment for the growing complexity and multidimensionality of company strategies, incentives, and demands. The data on the Russian manufacturing enterprises from two complementary surveys are used to estimate broader features of the firms pursuing particular innovation modes, including the intensity, efficiency, and impact of innovation activities, the importance of factors, hampering the performance and the heterogeneity of demand for the policy support measures. Resulting composition of the firm-level patterns and characteristics brings new facilities for the diagnosis-based policy-making in the field of innovation.
This article explores the potential of firm-level taxonomies of innovation behavior for analysis of structural changes within national innovation systems. Dynamic allocation of the heterogeneous types of actors is considered as a bridge between the discussion on institutional change and studies of the persistence of innovation at the firm level. Seven innovation taxonomies are constructed on the firm-level data on Russian industry, 2002–2012. Derived meso-level trends prove the robustness of the firm-level innovation modes over time and their capability of capturing the bounded change. For the case of the Russian Federation, the analysis emphasizes the absence of systemic change in the innovation-related incentives and reward mechanisms, but also the learning processes at the firm level, particularly, growing sophistication of the networking.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.