credit for doing design or development work that 

 should already have been completed satisfactorily, 

 and he recognizes that demonstrating culpability is 

 most difficult. Innovation to the factory is almost 

 always a nuisance. It frequently involves substan- 

 tial redevelopment, if not wholesale scrapping of 

 received results and starting anew. In various sec- 

 tors of machine building more than half of the plan 

 tasks for the assimilation of new technology are in- 

 complete due to deficiencies and errors at the re- 

 search, development, and design stages. 32 



To facilitate the transition, Soviet authorities 

 have recently taken several reform measures. These 

 may be grouped into plan-related, organizational, 

 and financial measures. 



Plan-Related Developments 



The fundamental means of accounting for introduc- 

 tion of R&D results, as we have seen, is specifica- 

 tion of all pertinent variables in the plan of the 

 R&D organization. Scheduled completion dates and ex- 

 pected manufacturing establishments are required, in 

 principle, to be designated in R&D project plans. 

 Difficulties in making these assignments effective, 

 however, include the problem of forecasting results 

 accurately at the initiation of R&D work and of elic- 

 iting the cooperation of the manufacturing enterprise, 

 In addition, it is unclear whether the manufacturer 

 subsequently is obligated to accept the innovation, 

 and the nonbinding character of many R&D plan tasks 

 combined with the difficulty of determining culpabil- 

 ity tend to vitiate the potency of plan stipulation. 

 Most important, however, mere stipulation does little 

 to alleviate the underlying causes contributing to 

 reluctance to innovate . And Soviet managers have 

 proven to be adept at modifying plans "from below" 

 and frustrating the real intent of central authori- 

 ties when their interests are threatened. 



Other plan-related developments involve an exten- 

 sion of the systems approach to include the utiliza- 

 tion stage. This may involve little more than devel- 



198 



