The improvement of state support for the agro-industry in regions is relevant. The purpose of the study is to find the opportunities for increasing investments to the agriculture, as well as to maximize returns from them. At the same time, an optimal structure of the fixed-capital assets of agriculture as well as the acceleration of the new technological wave in the national economy are necessary. Our hypothesis is that investments play the key role in developing the competitive advantages of agriculture. The study is based on Cobb-Douglass production function. The recipients of funds have a tendency to opportunistic behavior, which increases as the volume of support rises. This tendency is an important restriction that influences the investment efficiency. As a promising solution, we propose to grant the status of investment use to the funds received by the agricultural industry within the programmes of support. This status may be changed only when the funds are used many times for the investment purposes including input suppliers. It will provide both a high return from the funds supporting of agriculture and their budget effectiveness. Moreover, It will help to minimize opportunistic behavior of the recipients of funds. For preventing the investment mistakes connected with the choice of sub-optimal technological solutions, we propose to standardize State investment options. These options will include projects, which completely or mainly use the Russian-origin inputs, providing high production efficiency. The authors’ suggestions can be used by both researchers to investigate the increase in efficiency of state support in regional agriculture and universities in educational process.

The long-standing efforts of the agro-industry management to enhance the innovative processes resulted in more than modest innovative activity of their participants. The study assesses the openness to innovations of top managers and owners of the agro-industrial enterprises in Kurgan Oblast. We based the research on the thesis on the existence of a set of factors hampering innovative activity of the agro-industry, including subjective and socio-psychological factors. Moreover, we hypothesise that human factors play the decisive role in solving the problem of innovations’ implementation (or non-implementation). Underestimation of innovations’ role in the development of the managed system, main stakeholders’ resistance to innovations’ implementation cause agro-industry’s deceleration and implementation of the very conservative, inertial, extensive scenarios. We tested the hypothesis using a representative sample survey of top managers and owners of the small- and medium-sized agro-industrial enterprises. Using the standardised methodology of psychological testing of the main components of openness to innovations, we assessed an overall level of openness to innovations as fairly low. Organizational openness appeared to be the most problematic component, especially in comparison with relatively high values of personal and cognitive openness. For increasing innovative activity of the agro-industrial enterprises, we recommend state authorities, which regulate competitiveness, to use a more direct approach and the system of economic incentives for innovative behaviour. This system of incentives should include a system of standards of innovative activity that in case of failure would block the organization’s access to the programs of the agro-industry’s state support. The study’s results can be used in scientific research on the innovative activity of the regional agro-industry and in educational process of the field-oriented universities.