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The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the recent Russian Science and Technology Foresight – a full-fledged study targeted at the identification of the most promising areas of science and technology (S&T) development in Russia towards 2030 to ensure the realisation of the nation’s competitive advantages. It was organised as a complex project involving dozens of organizations performing particular tasks under the overall coordination by the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and more than 2,000 experts in various S&T fields.

Its methodology embraced a set of qualitative and quantitative methods and combined technology push and market pool approaches. For seven S&T areas (information and communication technologies, biotechnologies, medicine and health, new materials and nanotechnologies, rational use of nature, transportation and space systems, energy efficiency and energy saving), the following types of results have been obtained: global trends, national challenges and windows of opportunities; new markets and niches; innovation products and services; prospective technologies and R&D fields (50 thematic groups, over 1,000 items for all areas); assessment of the country’s positions vis-à-vis global leaders; recommendations for S&T and innovation policies.

The paper covers prospective drivers of economic growth and relevant implications for anticipatory evidence-based policy; discussions of national challenges and building a common vision of the future among key stakeholders; the role of Foresight in particular as a communication platform that helps integrating stakeholder interests; strengthening existing and developing new capacities to increase national competitiveness; and to move up along existing and emerging global value chains.

The Russian S&T Foresight, being deeply integrated in the national policy, can be considered as an exemplar tool for “wiring up” the national innovation system (NIS) of an emerging economy with its specific features and problems facing large-scale challenges.

This paper aims to provide a detailed case study of a corporate foresight for innovation (CFI) project done by the Higher School of Economics’ (HSE) (Moscow, Russia) corporate foresight (CF) unit for a large state-owned Russian service company. It demonstrates how CFI methods lead to recommendations and how these recommendations result in decisions.

Drawing from being part of the project team, review of the project documents and interviews, the case describes a multi-phased CFI project which incorporated several CF methods. Techniques used for the project itself included grand challenges and trend analysis, analysis of best practices through use of benchmarking and horizon scanning, interviews, expert panels, wild card and weak signals analysis, cross impact analysis, SWOT and backcasting. The project used a broad-base of secondary information, expert panels consisting of company experts and HSE CF team personnel, interviews with senior management and an extensive literature review using HSE’s propriety iFORA system.

In all 17 CFI recommendation and over 100 implementation recommendations were made; 94 per cent of the CFI recommendations were accepted with most implemented at the time this case was written. The case also identifies five enabling factors that collectively both helped the CFI project and led to a high rate of recommendation acceptance and one factor that hindered CFI project success.

The case study provides detailed information and insight that can help others in conducting CF for innovation projects and establishes a link between CF methods and innovation-based recommendations and subsequent decisions.

In-depth case studies that show academe and practitioners how CFI leads to recommendations and is linked to subsequent decisions have been identified as a gap in the literature. This paper therefore seeks to address this need by presenting a detailed CF case for a corporate innovation project.

This chapter sheds light on long-term trends in the level and structural dynamics of investments in Russian human capital formation from government, corporations, and households. It contributes to the literature discussing theoretical issues and empirical patterns of modernization, human development, as well as the transition from a centralized to a market economy. The empirical evidence is based on extensive utilization of the dataset introduced in Didenko, Földvári, and Van Leeuwen (2013). Our findings provide support for the view expressed in Gerschenkron (1962) that in late industrializers the government tended to substitute for the lack of capital and infrastructure by direct interventions. At least from the late nineteenth century the central government's and local authorities' budgets played the primary role. However, the role of nongovernment sources increased significantly since the mid-1950s, i.e., after the crucial breakthrough to an industrial society had been made. During the transition to a market economy in the 1990s and 2000s the level of government contributions decreased somewhat in education, and more significantly in research and development, but its share in overall financing expanded. In education corporate funds were largely replaced by those from households. In health care, Russia is characterized by an increasing share of out-of-pocket payments of households and slow development of organized forms of nonstate financing. These trends reinforce obstacles to Russia's future transition, as regards institutional change toward a more significant and sound role of the corporate sector in such branches as R&D, health care, and, to a lesser extent, education.