Though vastly divergent in size, natural resource endowment and human capital, all of the 15 former Soviet states inherited Soviet institutions. The decision to shed those structures and ideas, however, has been anything but uniform across the post-Soviet region. This article aims to expand what limited understanding we have of the extent to which path dependency in research and development (R&D) institutions can explain the divergence in national innovation performance in three post-Soviet states: Estonia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. This study finds that those countries, which retained the institutional R&D model of the Soviet Union, demonstrate subpar national innovation performance compared to the countries that chose to actively reform their R&D systems post-independence. This presents an important theoretical and practical contribution to the scholarship on path dependency and national innovation.

尽管15个前苏联国家的规模，自然资源end赋和人力资本差异很大，但它们都继承了苏联体制。然而，在整个后苏联地区，决定放弃这些结构和思想的决定绝非统一。本文旨在扩展我们对研发机构中路径依赖可以在何种程度上解释爱沙尼亚，乌克兰和哈萨克斯坦前苏联三个国家的国家创新绩效差异的有限有限理解。这项研究发现，与选择独立后积极改革研发体系的国家相比，那些保留了苏联体制研发模型的国家展示了低于国家水平的创新绩效。