Method to assess regions’ international cooperation in innovative activity

Developing countries due to insufficient domestic opportunities for high-quality development of innovative activity use opportunities of attracting resources from outside. Their main advantage over developed countries is that at the stage of modernization borrowing of technologies and management methods already proven their efficiency is an important incentive for increasing innovative activity of enterprises and organizations. Ensuring beneficial technology exchange, improving and implementing the regional organizational-economic mechanisms to promote international cooperation of Russian regions in the sphere of innovation are an important direction of the modern innovation policy. The adoption of balanced management decisions in this area requires data about the current development level of international innovative cooperation in the region, as well as what improvements in specific areas are of highest priority. This scientific article solves the task of developing methodological tools that help on the basis of mathematical operations with the generated database of specific statistical indicators, first, to consider the development of various areas of regions’ international cooperation in innovative activity and, second, build integrated indicators (indices) reflecting general development levels of regions’ international cooperation in the innovative sphere. The conduct of assessment on the basis of the method proposed in the research identifies a number of problems of Russian regions regarding development of international cooperation in the innovative activity. The work shows that in the Russian Federation we can single out types (groups) of regions in terms of correlation of the overall development level of region’s international cooperation in the innovative activity and the region’s orientation on technology export or technology import. It finds out that the composition of two largest groups of regions includes more than half of RF subjects. For these groups of regions the authors identify the priority measures to develop innovative activity on the basis of increased international cooperation