Development of Innovative Activities in Depressed Regions

One of the urgent problems of social and economic development in modern Russian conditions is the search for ways to activate innovation in depressed regions. It is necessary to study the existence and strength of the link between the level of development of innovation activity and the state of the socioeconomic climate using quantitative methods. The article analyzes ten constituent entities of the Russian Federation, which are considered to be "depressive". With the help of correlation analysis, it was defined that there is a connection between the position of the subjects in the innovation development rating and the position in the rating of their socioeconomic situation. Then, using the dispersion analysis, the authors of the article established a causal relationship between the level of socio-economic development of regions and the level of their innovative development. The statistical processing was carried out using a software package Statistica 10. The authors pointed out that there are two most often mentioned factors which restrain the development of innovative activity of depressed regions: "Socio-economic conditions of innovation activity" and "Scientific and technical potential". The first factor is determined by the level of efficiency of the regional economy, the availability of human resources for innovation, the level of development of the information society. The second is determined by the state of financial and human resources for innovation and the effectiveness of research and development. The development and implementation of measures to improve the effectiveness of the use of these factors will have the greatest impact on the development of innovative activities of depressed constituent entities of the Russian Federation and, accordingly, will contribute to increasing their level of socio-economic development.