Exergy numbers to measure innovation efficiency at different нierarchical levels of the economic system (PART 1 – METHODOLOGICAL)

The article analyses advantages and disadvantages of the main methods for determining the effectiveness of innovations both at the micro and macro levels of the economic system. It is shown that to assess the technical (technological) efficiency of innovations at the macro level, the only data used are those which do not actually correlate with microeconomic data on whose basis the effectiveness of the firm's innovations is assessed. This complicates the assessment of the impact of innovations at the micro-level on the part of an individual firm both on the macroeconomic situation and on the innovative efficiency of the whole economy. Similarly, the assessment of the impact of innovations at the macro level on the firm’s innovation efficiency remains insufficiently clear and is not empirically grounded. And the procedure of economic (price) assessment of the effectiveness of innovations does not guarantee their accurate and unambiguous measurement by its nature. With an arbitrary ratio of the value of prices for production resources, any technology can be optimal, if it, in one way or another, affects the unambiguity of assessments of the effectiveness of innovations, which are part of production technologies. And the existence of this problem is proved mathematically, by considering the pricing process within the framework of the well-known input-output model. In most cases, it is often even difficult to determine, for example, whether the changes to the technology proposed by the manufacturer are an innovation at all. It is even more difficult to determine the "degree of innovation" of this kind of change. In addition, the problems of monetary assessment of resource expenditures are aggravated by the unevenness of inflation in economic sectors, which, together with the devaluation of the national currency, can stimulate a permanent change in the optimal production technology, complicating the assessment of its innovative efficiency both at the micro and macro levels. Within the framework of the author's CMI-model of macroeconomic dynamics (business cycles), the relationship between monetary and energy flows in the economic system is explained, i.e. the specific long-term exergy (suitable energy) cost to produce goods and services is the basis for defining the "natural" prices to which market prices gravitate in a free competition. This paves the way for the use of purely exergy cost indicators to assess the effectiveness of innovations. And since the macro-equilibrium according to the CMI-model is a simple sum of the states of micro-equilibrium in all markets of the economic system (according to the system of national accounts), it becomes possible, in order to assess the effectiveness of innovations both at the macro and micro levels, to quantify the impact of innovations at the firm level on the effectiveness of innovations at the level of a particular sector or the entire economy. The author formulates the main advantages of exergy cost based method of assessment of innovation effectiveness in comparison with the monetary ones.