Summary Chernysh (Институционализация государственной поддержки инноваций в России 2000-х годов кейс бизнес-инкубаторов), страница 6

And a key way to check it is either to test it personally or to get the opinionof other members of the professional community. Thus, such an assessment reduced therisks of cooperation.3. Features of business incubators as organizationsIn the process of institutionalization, specific organizational forms (businessincubator, technopark) were used more as myths35 to attract resources, rather than asworking solutions for organizing support and reducing cognitive burden of the involvedactors.

These organizational forms-myths contributed to reciprocal legitimacy. Theyconveyed a clear message that the region was ready to support the federal agenda andknows how to do it. These myths also partly guaranteed that the regional efforts wouldbe supported.Within the created business incubators, formalization involved the work of theorganization itself. Incubators' structure, indicators of work, the rules for selectingresidents and partly for community creation were formally fixed. In practice formalizationdid not embrace the very process of developing residents as businesses.

The incubatorteam and experts engaged in this work could lead the incubation process at their owndiscretion, based on past experience, their own views and the needs of a particularresident. Also, the requirements for the selection of the staff responsible for the incubationwere no formalized. Thus, the state support of innovations in its institutionalized formcould not overcome the bias in the informal practices typical for this sphere.Habitualization and typification of actions connected with the company developmentalmost did not happen. So this actions could not transfer to the formal dimension.

On theone hand, the lack of formalization helped to preserve the essence of the work and its35Meyer J., Rowan B. Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony //Journal of Economic Sociology. 2011. Vol.

12 (1). P. 43–67 (in Russian).25efficiency (efficient incubation could have hardly taken place under other conditions). Onthe other hand, it made innovation support more vulnerable and dependent on thepresence of specific professionals and the quality of their work in the incubator team.Paradoxically, despite a high degree of informality, the incubators that were ableto consolidate the presence of the professional community in their structure could benefitthe most.

Thus, they institutionalized the principles of work (the normative level of theinstitution), rather than the specific consulting activities (the cognitive level of theinstitution). This later allowed the use of the solutions that corresponded to the genuinegoals of the organization.General conclusions from researchDespite the fact that the institution construction for the state support of innovationwas initiated from the top, institutionalization became a two-sided process of interactionbetween authorities and the professional community, which acted as an institutionalentrepreneur.This can be explained by the fact that the state support for innovation developmentas a social institution was constructed in the top-down manner and comprised an initialconflict in the first place.

The grounds for this conflict were the gaps between itsregulatory, normative and cognitive levels. Sociopolitical legitimacy was significantlyahead of the cognitive one. This particular conflict was resolved at the local level, namelythrough the activities of institutional entrepreneurs. This conflict led to a significantvariation in the scenarios and the results of the institutionalization of state support forinnovation in the regions.The conditions in which the potential for institutional entrepreneurship had anopportunity to be realized were related to the existence of a supportive regional context(whether the city where business incubators were established had a developed scientificand technological sector) and, most importantly, socio-political legitimacy. It providedan opportunity to predict the actions of other actors and to assess their benefits, which26contributed to the strategic action.

However, a high degree of institutionalization in thisarea was not observed.In the course of the analysis, we observed that on the one hand, the institutionalentrepreneur initiated and supported purposeful actions aimed at the formation of newinstitutions. On the other hand, this work was more likely to include identification andestablishment of informal rules and practices at cognitive and normative levels, than thecreation of formal rules at the regulatory level.This is the fundamental difference between an institutional entrepreneur and amanager. In the process of institutionalization, the manager is primarily focused on theformation and support of the regulatory basis of the institution and pays much lessattention to the normative and cognitive levels.

The control function strengthens to thedetriment of filling the institution with practices and values for its subsequent efficientwork. That is, for the positions of the manager and the institutional entrepreneur, thewatershed takes place according to the forms in which they work with the existinguncertainty.The key difference between the two cases is the self-awareness of experts from theprofessional community in the role of an institutional entrepreneur, which included thewillingness to actively engage in the creation of formal rules. This ultimately determinedthe scale of the development of the state support in the regions and its efficiency.

In thecase of Novosibirsk, business associations were more able to lead the creation of diversesupport for technological companies (from formulating the rules of incubation to thecreation of special housing programs). In the St. Petersburg case, the role of institutionalentrepreneurs was limited to the formation of basic principles of working with companies,using personal social networks, transferring of knowledge within the incubator. Furtherdevelopment of support was formed by project managers at later stages.The history of the business incubators' creation in the Novosibirsk Region and St.Petersburg has shown that institution construction has a chance to take place if theinformal rules (social norms, business arrangements, and profile practices) already existlocally and are close in meaning to the newly created formal ones. These informal rulesallow to fill the formal regulatory framework with appropriate content, give value-27normative guidelines and ensure the functioning of the new institution through routinepractices.However, for us the key feature is different: even if there are informal rules andpractices, successful institution formation should be accompanied by a large-scalenegotiation and search for suitable motivations for all the stakeholders.

This translates theprofessional task into a political dimension. The search for motivations promotesunification of various social groups for the benefit of common goals, as otherwiseofficials, technological entrepreneurs, scientists, etc. remain separate and a new socialreality does not arise. In the Russian case the demand for innovation from the federalauthorities does not only provide a socio-political legitimization, but also gives thenegotiating process a chance to be successfully implemented. In the context of currentdecrease in the state's interest in innovations, we can expect complications in thenegotiation process and weakening of the positions of the institutional entrepreneurs fromthe professional community.There is no doubt that the Novosibirsk case is unique, as there are few cases ofgrassroots consolidation of the professional community in the Russian science, R&Dsector and technological entrepreneurship (with the exception of IT) especially those thathave reached such a degree of formalization and efficiency.

However, the case of St.Petersburg shows that the willingness to negotiate can lead to similar results, even if thecommunity of technological entrepreneurs is not so united and successful in the region,as it was in the Novosibirsk region. One or several experts who are ready to assume therole of an institutional entrepreneur and negotiate are sufficient for the successfulinstitution formation.Thus, the development of institutions of state support for innovation in the Russiancase can be closely related to the role of individuals. This is due to the fact thatindependent collective actors (associations, societies, etc.) capable of carrying outcollective action rarely emerge in Russia. Especially when the organizational field is inthe period of formation. Additionally, the sphere of innovations has always been moreinformal and connected with the expert's personality.