ABSTRACT
"What is probably the most daunting task that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev faces in his gargantuan struggle to revitalize the stagnant Soviet economy is to impart to Soviet industry a propensity to innovate. This is by no means a new issue. When Joseph Berliner wrote his pioneering study of Soviet innovation more than a dozen years ago, 1 he succeeded in directing attention away from the traditional questions that had troubled economists for decades—whether a socialist economy could work at all, whether it could work efficiently, and whether it could sustain a high rate of growth—and in attracting attention instead to the question that has now become so important—whether the Soviet economy can be endowed with the attributes that will grant it the capacity to innovate, to generate rapid technological change.
