ИСТИНА

Russia inherited the economic activity location pattern from the Soviet Union, where the main forms of industrial organization were territorial-production complexes (TPC) - networks of industrial organizations united by a single technological process. In a market economy in the 90s, economic ties within the TPC were destroyed, leading to fragmentation of large enterprises and the formation of a set of independent firms. Some scientists believe that this situation over the last 20 years could serve as a necessary foundation for the clusters’ formation .Nowadays the interest in clusters in Russia rises again due to the need to find new mechanisms to support production and innovation in a stagnant economy. The Russian Ministry of Economic Development has developed a project to support the pilot territorial innovative clusters by providing funding for infrastructure formation. The aim of our work is to identify clusters as areas of geographical concentration of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We also wanted to check, whether the existing cluster initiatives correspond to the concentration of economic activity and whether there is any potential for increasing the existing cluster initiatives. In our work, we use the analysis based on the localization index. We propose a concentration and localization map of small and medium businesses in certain areas in a number of industries. The authors confirmed the existence of traditional and well-known clusters and identified previously unknown concentration of firms that have not declared their interaction yet.