IX THE FORMULATION OF R&D 

 PLANS AND PROGRAMS 



OVERVIEW OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PLANNING 



Plans in the Soviet Union are the fundamental in- 

 strument for integrating and controlling production 

 activities of all kinds and at all levels of aggre- 

 gation, ranging from the state as a whole through a 

 variety of economic units to the individual. By as- 

 suming this burden, plans must be not only directive, 

 conveying the wishes of the leadership, but also suf- 

 ficiently informative on factors external to the plan- 

 ning unit to permit effective coordination. Plans 

 must also incorporate a system of incentives and pen- 

 alties to insure the accomplishment of assigned tasks. 



By its very nature, R&D seems incompatible with 

 this type of planning. Optimally, plans predetermine 

 results, while R&D in varying degrees involves explo- 

 ration of unknown or uncertain territory. Problems 

 of uncertainty and risk are particularly great at the 

 fundamental research stage and subside increasingly 

 with movement toward the development end of the R&D 

 spectrum and the more deterministic world of produc- 

 tion. In general, this factor is recognized in So- 

 viet science policy. Larichev, for example, notes 

 that "formulation of the goals of planning depends 

 substantially on the means of determining with a suf- 

 ficient degree of certainty the expected final re- 

 sults of R&D." 1 Because of the difficulties of pre- 

 dicting and evaluating R&D results, their aggregation 

 is also appreciably harder than the aggregation of 

 production targets. Indeed, until well into the 1950s 

 activities under research, development, and innova- 

 tion in the USSR were seen as "too complex and numer- 

 ous and the results too unpredictable and indefinite 

 to be worth the effort of joining them into a single 

 coherent plan. "2 For that matter, R&D was still re- 



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