the technical administrations and coordinating de- 

 partments of ministries lack specialists with any ad- 

 vanced scientific degrees. Some responsible staff 

 even lack a higher education. ° Nonetheless, many 

 branch R&D organizations display great timidity to- 

 ward their ministries . The studies they conduct are 

 often pro forma exercises that fail to expose defi- 

 ciencies in the development of the branch, much less 

 in the leadership of the ministry. 9 



Generally speaking, the Soviet approach to struc- 

 turing and managing innovation has been premised on 

 an image of technology transfer that prevailed large- 

 ly in the West until the early 1960s. According to 

 this view, the transfer process is envisaged as "the 

 passage of disembodied 'ideas and methods,' endowed 

 with some quasi- independence in the manner of genes, 

 from one state of existence or milieu to another." 

 The underlying assumption is that technology is pri- 

 marily "an assemblage of pieces of information which 

 can be extracted or expelled from one sector of or- 

 ganized creativity and transposed to another to pro- 

 duce different outputs. "10 The whole process is re- 

 duced to clerical reporting, to a mechanical trans- 

 mission of documents and routing of information. 



As has happened in the West, this perception of 

 technology transfer is being increasingly questioned 

 and replaced by a more dynamic and systems view. One 

 of the major Soviet discoveries about innovation in 

 the 1970s, in fact, was the importance of the "man- 

 agement connection." The very phrase "research-to- 

 production" cycle is said to be a misnomer because 

 action throughout must be negotiated and mediated. 

 It is better to speak in terms of a system of "re- 

 search-management-production," to use the words of 

 some Soviet analysts. Such phraseology, they note, 

 conveys a more adequate image of this complex pro- 

 cess. It also explicitly identifies and emphasizes 

 the management function and linkage. l With gradual 

 movement away from a strictly phase-dominant to a 

 more process view of innovation, the need for a sys- 

 tems model of organization and management has become 

 more and more apparent. Indeed, it is not too much 

 of an exaggeration to say that the Soviet research- 



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