Tools for stimulating the innovation activity of organizations in the context of sustainable economic development of regions

Abstract

The decline of the innovation activity rate of organizations from 24,6% in 2020 to 15,2% in 2022, followed by only a partial recovery, exposed a discrepancy between the expansion of budget support and the actual return of the applied toolkit, a discrepancy that has not yet received a satisfactory explanation in regional economics. The aim of the study is to identify which parameter of the portfolio of stimulation tools – the volume of financing, the effectiveness of organizational coverage, or the unit return of support – makes the decisive contribution to the increment of a region’s innovation result. Using an author’s three-factor multiplicative model, the chain-substitution method decomposes the increment of the portfolio’s innovation return for 2021-2025; the scenario sensitivity of the net present value of the instruments is calculated against a discount rate tied to the trajectory of the Bank of Russia key rate. It is established that the budget increment explains only half of the aggregate increase in return (50,1%), whereas the qualitative parameters – coverage effectiveness and unit return – jointly provide a comparable contribution (24,0 and 26,0% respectively). The elasticity of the portfolio’s present value with respect to the discount rate within the 14,5-21,0% corridor amounted to about –1.67, which indicates the sensitivity of long-term instruments to the cost of capital. The dominance of the extensive factor alongside the compressed return of the qualitative parameters means that the reserve for raising a region’s innovation activity is concentrated in reconfiguring the mechanism of fund delivery and absorption rather than in increasing the aggregate volume of support.