Territorial innovation clusters and economic modernization, the policy of "territorial innovation clusters" in Russia.

Summary The so-called "transition economies" that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall disappeared more than twenty years ago. In these "new" market economies, the accumulation of skills and knowledge forming a "reservoir" of organizational and cognitive resources is distributed according to a territorial polarization closely linked to local history. By proposing, in this research work, the concept of "territorial innovation cluster", the objective was to formulate a conceptual tool for the attention of public decision-makers in order to reinforce the productive architecture of territories. The policy of "territorial innovation clusters" was initiated in 2012 in 25 territories of Russia with the aim of modernizing a plurality of local productive systems. Taking the territories of Novosibirsk and Tomsk in Western Siberia (Russia) as the object of empirical study, it is possible to observe that if the "territorial innovation clusters" of Novosibirsk and Tomsk initially favored a process of local governance integrating the majority of local territorial actors or groups of actors (which could contribute to the emergence of innovation dynamics), The Russian state then unilaterally imposed decisive changes in the organization of territorial development (reinforcing the "lock-in" phenomena). In this context, the potential of the territories of Novosibirsk and Tomsk to generate the emergence of "territorial innovation clusters", if it has been highlighted in this research work, has not been valorized by the integration of "territorial innovation clusters" to the territories.