Leading role of foresight technology in management of breakthrough technologies in regional industry

In the new system of macroeconomic coordinates, the temporal presentation of the process of forecasting technological development of industry is fundamentally changing within the concept of structural reform of the national economy. Because of the high turbulence of factors, especially the external environment, despite the absolute importance of scientific perspective, it is possible to speak with a greater probability of their occurrence only in a short- and medium-term context. In accordance with this, the guiding role of technological foresight in the management of breakthrough technologies is strengthened precisely within these time horizons. And the success of achieving the goals is determined by the digitalization of a decision-making process and the introduction of closed-loop economic models within the framework of the interaction of enterprises in the breakthrough technology sector. This new stage of development of industrial enterprises (in terms of activity, specialization, and development of circular value chains) reflects their orientation to the parameters of technological foresight. The paper presents the results of a critical analysis of modern approaches to research and technological foresight impact assessment methods on the regions’ industrial structural reform, gives its program modules embedding hierarchical representation in conjunction with the goals of macro, meso and micro levels. The technological foresight global goal-oriented role at the macro level, its adaptive (to the region’s specifics) role at the meso level and the technological forethought role at the level of a specific industrial enterprise (association) realizing regional and sectoral goals is substantiated. On the basis of the empirical analysis of comparative dynamics of indicators of innovation activity in the regions of Russia, reference marks were identified. On their base clusters were built that characterize the dynamics of the development of federal entities of the Russian Federation in terms of the technological type of their industry. As a result of repeated clustering, the clusters or industrial drivers for the implementation of technological foresight targets, including the ones in the regions of South of Russia were identified. This allowed us to draw reasonable conclusions about the appearance of technologically breakthrough innovation clusters in these regions and the dynamics of their development.