Abstract. In today's world innovation plays a key role in securing a country’s economic and technological leadership. It encourages governments to increase investment in innovative areas and look for ways to improve the efficiency of science and innovation funding in order to increase the economic benefits of R&D budget allocation. Despite vast differences of measures used by countries to promote innovative activity, it is possible to identify some common approaches to restructuring the budget support mechanisms for science and business innovation, which have been applied in recent years by a growing number of states. One of the most important trends, which has achieved global scale, is to expand the practice of project finance for fundamental and applied research while reducing the share of the traditional budgeted funding of research institutions and universities. In many countries, the transition to the project-oriented support of R&D stimulated institutional restructuring of the public science funding system, with a marked increase of the importance of authorized government agencies (foundations, research councils, etc.) involved in the assessment, selection and allocation of grants for scientific projects and programs. In a number of states, increased role of tax incentive tools for corporate R&D, larger financing of small and medium-sized high-tech enterprises and broader public procurement of domestic innovative products are among the main reform areas of state support to corporate innovation. According to the authors, despite the growing popularity of these approaches on a global scale, it would be wrong to speak of them as cure-all solutions suitable for all countries to enhance efficiency of state innovation. First of all, the experience accumulated by countries implement appropriate varies seriously and is not positive everywhere. Besides, the ongoing profound differences in the organization of innovative systems in certain countries make it difficult to use even those foreign developments in management science that have proven their productivity, requiring serious adaptation and adjustment to the specifics of national economies, and scientific and technological environment.