Research Information System
Post-Communist Economies, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
This paper investigates why institutional transformation within Azerbaijan’s innovation system remains elusive despite more than a decade of policy reform and ecosystem-building. Although the path-dependent character of post-Soviet innovation systems is recognised, the mechanisms through which it is reproduced remain under-theorised. Drawing on 59 elite interviews across academia, industry, and government, the study analyses historically sedimented processes that shape coordination between the three spheres. Using the Triple Helix framework alongside Historical Institutionalism, it identifies institutional layering within each helix, whereby new formal arrangements are grafted onto entrenched informal routines, sustaining continuity through adaptation rather than replacement. The analysis shows how intrahelical inertia constrains internal change, accumulates into interhelical lock-in that limits cross-sphere influence, and ultimately generates system-level path dependence that prevents the emergence of a trilateral overlay. This dynamic, produced through interaction, coordination/capability, and intellectual failures, creates motion without advancement and clarifies why reforms fail to produce systemic transformation.