The Regulatory and Legal Framework for Achieving Russia’s Technological Leadership

The paper examines conceptual issues involved in implementing the strategic technology project (STP) of Kutafin University (MSAL) to create an innovative legal environment for achieving Russia’s technological leadership. The author characterizes the organizational and legal situation in the regulatory framework governing science that emerged in Russia during the post-reform period. The paper shows that, at the initial stage of legal transformations, the innovation sector did not receive the necessary organizational, legal, property-related, financial, and tax priorities and incentives to ensure the accelerated development of research and development. The author concludes that, in order to address the accumulated issues, it is necessary to create an appropriate legal environment, and the university’s strategic technology project is aimed at shaping such an environment from a research perspective. The paper describes the project’s areas of development: the study of legal instruments for supporting the economy’s technological objectives; the legal adaptation of the country’s industrial development programs; legal support and transfer of developments, etc. The study substantiates the main criteria for evaluating the project: originality, consumer orientation, economic technological feasibility, compliance with international standards, risk assessment, identification of markets for applying the results, project performance indicators, and others. The paper argues for a new positioning of the university in legal science and education as an intellectual center within the infrastructure that supports the legal component of technological leadership, creating an environment for the regulatory, ethical, and economic design of technologies. The scientific component of the program is aimed at developing a model of legal regulation, legal liability, and, more broadly, an architecture of trust under conditions of technological uncertainty. The author proposes a new interpretation of the traditional hierarchy of innovation: not only do technologies respond to legal requirements, but lawyers become embedded in the very logic of design, reframing the definition of «innovation» from a technological dimension to institutional and managerial dimensions. The study substantiates the position that the university is becoming not only a testing ground for regulatory innovations, but also a designer of future technology governance regimes before technologies are fully deployed; examines issues related to the project’s organizational structure and concludes that cluster projects must be restructured to meet the objectives of socioeconomic, technological, federal, and regional programs for technological leadership. It considers the creation of a school of legal innovation as a form of talent pipeline for young researchers. The paper’s overall conclusion is that the university serves not only as a center of current legal engineering, but also as a scientific actor in legal decision-making — an ecosystem for the regulatory forecasting of technologies.

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