STRENGTHENING THE BONDS OF MOTIVATION 



The motivational and collaborative issues left un- 

 attended by previous approaches to innovation are al- 

 so receiving greater attention today. On one level, 

 efforts have been made to strengthen the role of eco- 

 nomic stimuli. Some specialists feel, in fact, that 

 too much emphasis is being placed on this direction. 

 According to Gusarov, "Essentially the system of stim- 

 ulation has been reduced to a system of material in- 

 centives, and this is not correct." Others argue, 

 "We must not fear the creation of large incentive 

 funds at enterprises producing high quality products: 

 they pay for themselves entirely by eliminating los- 

 ses due to low quality production." New incentive 

 funds have been established at R&D organizations, and 

 steps have been taken to tie the funding and awarding 

 of bonuses more closely to the return that R&D re- 

 sults yield the consumer and the economy. A number 

 of experiments are also underway that seek to relate 

 salary levels to productivity and to the results of 

 work of research personnel. 



In general, though, there remain a number of trou- 

 blesome and unresolved issues surrounding this whole 

 question. Yu . V. Borozdin notes, "The fact of the 

 matter is that to date there is still a certain gap 

 between the system of planning, the system of incen- 

 tives, and the system of price formation." The award- 

 ing of incentives is based upon faulty and obsolete 

 (1968) methods of pricing new products and of equally 

 ineffective and outdated (1961) methods of determin- 

 ing economic return on new technology. Two systems of 

 incentives still exist at production enterprises: one 

 is geared to the fulfillment of basic economic activ- 

 ity and the other to the application of new technol- 

 ogy. Not only do the two frequently contradict each 

 other, but the latter system, according to M. I. Vol- 

 kov, "is easily overshadowed" by the former. Lev 

 Gatovsky similarly writes that the stimuli for new 

 technology cannot serve as a real "counterweight" to 

 the rewards for basic production. "Methods of cost 



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