proach, on the other hand, has been the highly active 

 Agricultural Extension Service where field agents 

 know well the local users and serve, in effect, as 

 salespeople for new technology. 



All these governmental programs encourage research 

 utilization only after the R&D results have been gen- 

 erated. Most effective industrial approaches to tech- 

 nology utilization, however, begin much earlier in the 

 innovation process. Industry also provides an inte- 

 grated and coordinated system from conceptualization 

 to commercialization that does not exist in the gov- 

 ernmental sector. Indeed such an approach is used in 

 the public sector only in areas like defense or space 

 when the federal government both creates and defines 

 the market and is the principal customer itself. Even 

 here, however, systems planning and management is not 

 always efficient or economical. 



The practical translation of R&D results is one of 

 the most deficient areas of S&T policy in the USSR. 

 Traditionally, Soviet economic policy has minimized 

 investment in an experimental base and scientific in- 

 struments industry in favor of investment in on-line 

 production facilities. The development sector, the 

 crucial intermediary between research and production, 

 tends to be neglected. The share of expenditures on 

 development and engineering applications has been on- 

 ly about two-thirds that in the United States. As a 

 result there continues to be a scarcity of experimen- 

 tal facilities to develop and test prototypes. 



In general, the vital interfaces in the transfer 

 process have not been explicitly and effectively 

 structured or linked. The utilization of R&D has fal- 

 len outside the bounds of both science planning and 

 production planning. Innovation or the introduction 

 stage has not been an organic part of the system of 

 planning and administration. There is no special pur- 

 pose organization charged with managing diffusion in 

 the Soviet Union. For the most part, extensive — but 

 ineffective — S&T information storage and retrieval 

 systems have been relied on. These services, which 



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