“Third sector”: challenges and potential of university science in engineering and technology in the late USSR

The article analyzes the efforts to stimulate university science at the level of management and methodological organization of university R&D during the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article is based on the study of materials of late Soviet publications, interviews with engineers who worked in the field of R&D during the late Soviet period, and recollections of university employees involved in R&D. It is generally believed that research activities in the late USSR were predominantly concentrated in the academic sector and branch research institutes, while universities were on their periphery. However, new studies show that HEIs were seen as an integral element of the R&D system, and there were attempts made at the Union level to intensify the involvement of Soviet HEIs in these activities. Decrees were adopted on additional funding and incentives for contracting between performers from HEIs and customers from industry and sectoral research institutes. This practice became known as “contract science” and can be regarded as the inclusion of pro-market mechanisms in the sphere of R&D. The author discusses contradictions and barriers to more active involvement of universities in R&D. Soviet experts noted that financial and legal departments of universities approached initiative and contractual R&D with caution and created bureaucratic delays in their conclusion and implementation. Funding for R&D was unstable, leading to a high share of incomplete R&D. University science in engineering and technology also suffered from the common problems of Soviet R&D, such as the gap between the stage of development of a new product and inventing it and bringing it into industrial production. Delays or stoppages in implementation resulted in significant number of new developments made in cooperation with universities remaining at the prototype stage.