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output volumes for science-intensive products, in part replacing them with technically simpler and cheaper goods.

Innovation policy is a powerful tool, with the help of which it is possible to overcome the economic downturn, ensure economic restructuring, and fill the market with a variety of competitive products. Today, with the current sharp deficit of investments, the country needs constructive platforms and action programs.

A way out of the current situation that will ensure a broad-scale, dynamic, and stable flow of innovative processes may be found by implementing a powerful state innovation policy aimed at concentrating financial resources and state participation in the development of a regional infrastructure for innovation activity. Other key points include creating a system for providing information through all stages of the innovation cycle, conditions for close cooperation between science and industry and industry and the market, a legal system and environment for technology commercialization with the requisite protection for domestic scientific-technical developments, and conditions for attracting private investments to innovation activity. Implemented with the help of state innovation programs, the concentration of funds on infrastructure creation in the scientific-technical spheres will, with the help of the newly created mechanism, promote an effective solution for the problem of intensifying innovation activity.

Instead of the rather ineffective process of saving Russia's scientific-technical potential, a strategy must be found to activate scientific-technical resources and develop science-intensive innovation activity on a massive scale. It is infrastructural support that allows small enterprises to gain access to production facilities, which is essential in adequately meeting the fundamental objectives involved in producing innovative goods.

An analysis of the economic situation in Russia, taking into account existing world experience, indicates that economic recovery and the restoration of production facilities can be expected as a result of increasing the number and volume of small high-tech firms based on commercializing the newest achievements of science and engineering. This sphere of entrepreneurial innovation activity is extremely poorly developed in Russia today. One of the basic reasons for the insufficiently quick and effective development of innovation activity in the scientific-technical sphere lies in the problem of personnel training and retraining.

A critically important internal precondition for the enhancement of existing scientific-technical potential is the development in Russia of small innovative firms and venture capital-oriented science-intensive structures based on various forms of property ownership. Also important are such qualitatively new economic structures as business innovation centers, business incubators, research and technology parks, engineering centers,