Architecture and attributes of innovation infrastructure

Abstract

The innovation constituent of development is the most important element of the transition from industrial to the post-industrial type of society. The innovation infrastructure is one of the most important factors of the innovation development. Therefore, it is logical that there are a lot of researches of the innovation infrastructure phenomenon. Despite this fact, nowadays, such researches are fragmented, and very rarely focused on the study of the innovation infrastructure architecture, and its attributes.The purpose of the article is to study the architecture and main attributes of the innovation infrastructure.Results. The present study finds out that:1. There are two approaches to the identification of the innovation infrastructure architecture in the scientific literature (a wide one when the innovation infrastructure includes the whole complex of enterprises, organizations, institutions, and entities that provide innovation development; a narrow one when the innovation infrastructure includes only innovative enterprises, only specialized institutions, only enterprises, organizations and institutions providing various functional (marketing, consulting, scientific, etc.) services to provide innovation, innovation process, etc. 2. Specialized institutions of innovation infrastructure include business incubators, technology transfer centers, innovation centers, parks’ structures (technology parks, science parks). 3. Specialized institutions are network structures, which function in form of a «star» (non-parks’ structures) or a «tree» (parks’ structures). 4. The activity of park structures aims at forming a scientific and production environment and commercialization of scientific developments; the activity of non-park structures (of the incubator type) is to support innovation entrepreneurship. 5. The elements of innovation infrastructure can be differentiated by purpose, a territorial character, the form of ownership, the level of profitability, the level of specialization, the sphere of focusing attention, the level of dependence on other elements of innovation infrastructure. 6. The paper distinguishes the following types of innovative infrastructures: global, a macro level, meso-level, a micro level (spatial-territorial feature); effective, ineffective (the level of efficiency); balanced, unbalanced (structure); integrated, nonintegrated (the degree of integration, dependence), the innovation infrastructure the creation of which is planned; the nnovative infrastructure that is under creation; the innovative infrastructure, which is exploited; the innovation infrastructure, which is in the stage of optimization (the stage of life cycle, development). 7. The universal attributes of innovation infrastructure are inertia, adaptability, equivalence, purposefulness, organization, integrity, functionality, structure, stability, determinism, the consistency of constituent elements, resource intensity, controllability, high riskiness, exclusivity, and specific synergy, versatility, multilevel complementarity.