Directorate of Research & Innovative Activities: New Structure Means New Mission

A restructuring of the Directorate of Research and Innovative Activities & Postgraduate Education of Astrakhan State University has recently taken place. Prof. Marina Lozovskaya, Chief of the Directorate, has told us about the reasons for such a process, about its outcomes, and about ASU’s further research and innovative activities.

“Changes in the structure of our Directorate have caused its renaming into the Directorate of Research & Innovative Activities. Now it includes eight units instead of three. The main idea of the recent restructuring is to centralize the overall management of research and innovative processes that take place at Astrakhan State University. In general, responsibilities have been redistributed within a large directorate; they’ve been united into thematic groups, and particular people have been appointed for their particular areas of work.

Let me tell you about each unit in brief. I’d begin with units that were recently included into the Directorate. The Unit of PhD Programs coordinates the academic and scientific training of students covering such programs at our University; it also enhances such training and supervises activities performed by our dissertation councils. The main task of the Salon of Investments & Innovations is to make image of both our University in general and our small innovative enterprises operating at ASU in particular. The Unit of Fundraising & Research Analytical Activities promotes the most viable scientific ideas by creating databases of projects by our professors and students. This unit is also to perform analytical activities - in particular, to submit reports to all the organizations adjacent to our University. The Unit of Intellectual Property, firstly, analyzes patent opportunities of new ideas suggested by our researchers so as to prevent them from being published in case they violate copyright. As a result of such activities, the bank of our non-material deposits increases. Secondly, this unit handles objects of our intellectual property, i.e. it rents them by means of licensing agreements and tracks their application by various enterprises and University units; it also sells exclusive licenses, which contributes to non-budget assets of our University.

Now let me tell you about our new units. One of them is the Unit for Technological Platforms Relations. A technological platform is a site that provides interaction between universities and business. ASU, being a co-founder and a coordinator of the Technological Platform “Technologies of Food & Food-Processing Industry - Healthy Nutrition Products”, ought to be among the first organizations that develop this field of activities. We also set up the Unit of International Research & Innovative Activities, whose tasks include provision of the right conditions to increase our scholars’ citation indexes, to increase the number of papers published by them in international reviewed journals, etc. The Unit of State Order was set up to provide our University’s work to meet state orders, in particular, execution of the Presidential Program and programs related to operation of regional ministries. As for the Unit of Innovative Management, it’s responsible for our small innovative enterprises and for innovative projects.

All in all, activities that our Directorate performs contribute to ASU’s promotion in the regional research and innovative ecosystem. ASU interacts with organizations of various types: federal and regional authorities, business companies, industrial enterprises, technoparks, institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, etc. Our activities are aimed to reindustrialize, to increase the competitiveness of Astrakhan Region’s companies by introducing technologies and innovations, to modernize the traditional sectors of the regional economy. The innovative infrastructure of our University contributes to providing the right environment to develop science-consuming business and to commercialize results of researches. I believe the commercialization process should be accompanied with a shift from the push approach to the pull approach at this stage: it means that our University should have an active position towards its research activities and be willing to meet the needs of the market, as it’s difficult to achieve real success by offering the market everything and anything. Our common goal is to achieve recognition of Astrakhan State University as an educational, research, and innovative center at the regional and even at the national levels. And the Directorate of Research & Innovative Activities plays quite an essential role in meeting this goal”.

Interviewed by T.Yu. Gavrilkina (the Innovative Laboratory of Information Linguistics of ASU)