The article is devoted to the explication of the conditions conducive to competitiveness and academic leadership. The authors show that Russian academic milieu is characterized with the organizational isomorphism which appears to be the result of the state policy deliberately and coordinately implanting Western academic capitalism into Russian institutional context. The article presents explanation of the notion of “academic capitalism” meaning the “knowledge regime change” and explicates its practical realization expressed in change of the configuration “state - university - private business”. The results of such policy include diminishing of the state’s role in science management (deregulation) with the increasing of the role of the marketlike relations and social-economic mechanism of self- organization. The authors prove that the implementation of the academic capitalism originated within the Western academia into Russian institutional milieu has its own specificities determined with the high degree of centralization and hierarchal bureaucratic governance system in Russian academia. This system eliminates flexibility and diminish any sort of faculty initiative. The central focus of the article concerns the results of the new empirical studies which explicitly shows that the reform of the academia is accompanied by a range of negative consequences creating obstacles to the labor productivity and the competitiveness of the academic environment. The research proposes the analysis of the specificity of the Russian academic capitalism. On the one hand, the organizational bodies for the fostering smart economy are created, on the other hand, there is no merge of publicand private sector and, therefore, universities are not transformed into marketlike corporations with the state support (like in the USA). The conclusion of the article formulates the recommendations for the policies that foster competitiveness of the academic environment. The authors believe that to form Western-like academic capitalism a certain level of economic development is required as such economy would provide a market which is full of customer demand for sciencebased technologies developed within the walls of the universities and research institutes.