The human capital: education and the green economy

According to the Russia’s Innovative Development Strategy until 2020 (Strategy) [1], one of the main goals of innovative growth of the Russian Economy lays in the advanced studies in the fields of renewable energy and low-carbon economy, genome medicine, and implementation of new technologies in agriculture, the fields in which Russia still faces with sufficient technological backlog. In general, the Strategy and following National Science project [2] approved in 2018 is aimed at Russia’s transition from one of the most energy- and carbon-intensive countries to a sustainable low-carbon economy. Russia needs to attract additional resources in human and knowledge capital in order to eliminate or decrease this technological backlog and to join international scientific community’s efforts in the field of green economy. This paper studies how influencing one of two pillars of the Global Innovation Index (GII), knowledge and technology output pillar, by implementing innovations in Russian higher education affects Russian innovative infrastructure and provides technical and resource baseline in reaching main strategic indicators of innovative development in Russia. This paper proposes a framework for attracting and retaining human resources and creating knowledge capital for transition to a sustainable low-carbon economy on the basis of micro and meso level changes