This article considers the current problems of development and innovation activities in the Russian Federation and the need to transfer the Russian manufacturing sector to modern high-tech rails. However, despite the fact that the country's top leadership emphasizes the course of innovative development as having no alternative, the relevant ministries, large state and non-state corporations, hinder implementation activities or imitate them still play an important role. For this reason, there are outright failures in the production of certain types of weapons, dual-use products, microelectronics, mechanical engineering and other important industries in the Russian Federation. The problem of imitation activity becomes urgent under modern conditions of political instability and military-technical risks which infl uence national and economic state security. The article reveals objective and subjective factors that caused high-tech activities to be pushed back in the recent past for many years.