Government promotion of scientific research and innovative activity at higher educational institutions: the main instruments of support, its scale and beneficiaries

One typical feature of Russia’s science sector, inherited from the Soviet period, is the predominant role in its research and development (R&D) activities of the ‘traditional’ scientific research organizations, represented by the research institutes operating under the system of government-funded academies of sciences (academic science), as well as by the research institutes and R&D bureaus subordinated to branch ministries and government departments (sectoral science); meanwhile, the role of higher educational institutions (HEE) in those activities was rather modest. At the same time, since the early 2000s, the volume of R&D projects launched in Russia by higher educational institutions and the number of researchers participating in them, has been increasing at a stable rate both in absolute and relative terms. As a result, over the last one-and-a-half decades, the number of researchers involved in the higher education sector increased more than 1.5 times, the sector’s relative share in the total number of researchers and total internal R&D costs[1] nearly doubled, and the corresponding costs incurred by higher educational institutions in constant prices increased more than 4-fold.