The review presents strategic trends of 2017. The annual research is conducted through methodology of Russia’s strategic matrix developed by experts of the Institute for Economic Strategies, which analyzes the main aspects of Russia’s internal development in nine areas: governance, territory, natural resources, population, economy, culture and religion, science and education, armed forces, geopolitical environment.

The paper examines the condition, problems and prospects of development of Russian pharmaceutical industry. The majority of medicines (82%) produced in Russia are generics. The share of innovative drugs is small — only 18%. The Ministry of health of the Russian Federation plans by the year 2025 to improve this ratio to 35:65. Therefore, the main challenge facing the pharmaceutical industry lies in the active development of innovative medicines and development of the technology of their production. The article studies three major industry issues and solutions to them: shortage of domestic pharmaceutical substances, lack of qualified specialists with modern skills and lack of development of medical products’ domestic production. The article shows that thanks to the timely adoption of the state development strategy “Pharma-2020” (2009) and the Federal target program “Development of pharmaceutical and medical industry for 2013–2020” and their practical implementation, the above-mentioned problems are being successfully resolved. The main conclusion of this paper is that the expansion and technological modernization of the domestic pharmaceutical industry and medical devices’ production is a task of utmost national importance. The contribution of the industry to national GDP today is 1%. However, the potential of the industry is that its share in GDP could grow to 3-5% in the next 10-15 years. In addition, the industry plays an extremely important role in solving social and demographic problems, as well as improving the quality of human capital.

In the article the author addresses the problem of assessing effectiveness of innovation strategies of socially responsible businesses and provides an overview of the most promising and relevant approaches to evaluation. In the author’s field of view there are such approaches as evaluation of stock exchange indices, the status of socially responsible projects in business organizations, non-financial reporting, introduction of KPI indicators in implementation of innovative strategies, monitoring, rational and ethical approaches, as well as the evaluation methods described in the manual by G.F. Ostapenko “Corporate Social Responsibility” and in the article by O.А. Leshchenko “Modern methods of assessing effectiveness of companies activities in the CSR field”.