Place of Infrastructure in the Innovation Ecosystem of Industry

An analysis of the reasons for the low innovation activity of domestic industrial enterprises indicates that one of the significant circumstances that keep constraining the mastering of new equipment, technologies, organizational and marketing decisions is the insufficient level of development of the innovation infrastructure, the formation of new elements of which began in the mid-nineties of the last century. At the same time, both among domestic researchers and foreign specialists in innovation, there is no unambiguous understanding of this category, which does not allow us to reasonably offer a set of organizational and economic tools to compensate for this deficiency. The goal of this paper is to concretize the concept of innovation infrastructure in order to correctly determine the ways of its development to a level capable of removing obstacles to the accelerated mastering of innovations in production. In the course of achieving the goal, the challenges of identifying the significance of the studied category in innovation development, of concretizing the concept of innovation infrastructure in accordance with the logic dictated by the classification of types of economic activity, as well as of substantiating the methods that should be used when solving issues of its development have been met. The results allow us to assert that innovation infrastructure belongs to the sphere of economic activities, the purpose of which is not to generate new knowledge or to replicate new products, but to serve the processes of creating and mastering innovations in industry. This conclusion determines the methods which should be applied in the development of innovation infrastructure, in particular, the methods of organizing economic networks and clusters. Their main distinguishing feature is their applicability not to the production sphere, but to the sphere of scientific services in the terminology that was used to qualify the branches of the national economy of Russia.