Comment by yetihehe
2 years ago
> To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions"
Yes, but very often someone did that rationalizing suggestion and the manager got the reward. Most people suggesting improvements stopped after one small improvement when treated like that, so whole idea was doomed to fail by poor execution.
Bad manager problem does not explain persistent technological lagging of USSR. There were good managers too, after all. The central reason is that any significant innovation implementation is a sort of travel to terra incognita. It's hard, and risky. So it requires someone who expects to get a reward big enough to pay for all the pain. Socialist/communist approach is not compatible with it on fundamental level as big rewards means inequality. Plenty of Soviet engineers proposed ineteresting ideas, and many of them were socialistically rewarded for them (e.g. "gramota" with Lenin's face, and maybe a small bonus), but very few people wanted to risk implementing those ideas. It was always better to rely on a low-risk approach: blueprints stolen from the West.