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PROCEEDINGS OF THE EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ECIE 2019
Academic fundraising landscape in Russia radically changed within the past ten years with increased research funding from different sources. Most of funding for Russian universities is still provided from for-profit education, but each public university setting has been required to earn extra money through external grants, contracts, building endowments and attracting sponsors. The effectiveness of research funding contests on reducing the regional disproportion problem of Russian universities has not been clearly characterised before this study. Here we employ the dataset from the 2014-2018 research grants and tiled cartogram to illustrate the different relationship between number of researchers and number of research grants. Then analyse the data on endowments to rank universities in terms of overall income. We observe that the support from business and political elite is essential for building endowment, however the state regional universities are often more efficient in attracting research funding. In this paper we aim to provide a clear picture of the challenges and opportunities for the modern academic fundraising in Russia illustrated with five representative cases from the university practice.