Especially interesting with all of the talk about the unique levels of innovation that capitalism brings that supposedly justify all of the other stuff.
Research != innovation. Innovation is more about practical implementation of novel ideas (incl. ones coming from research) - something at which soviets weren't very good at.
Innovation happens mostly in a bottom-up fashion, either on a big scale, the way it's done in Silicon Valley, or in smaller scale, by for example just having thousands of independent grocery stores in a given city, each free to experiment with the way they conduct business.
In contrast, in soviet states, everything was centrally organized and ran, which meant zero freedom to innovate at the ground level. This resulted in incredible inefficiency, as better ways of doing thing couldn't possibly be invented (unless the bureaucrat in Moscowwho controlled a given sector of the economy had a genuinely good idea, but that was rare).
Research, on the other hand, is much more prone to centralization, so it was doing quite well in the Soviets. Hence they ended up with a lot of research, but not that much innovation.
The article commented in this thread is one such example: neural networks were put to actual real-world use by western companies. Another example is the attempt of USSR to build something like the internet before the current one was thought out. They had the vision but the implementation somehow didn't take off.
Both the US and USSR knew about neural networks for decades before fast massively parallel hardware made them feasible long after the end of the USSR, so I'm not sure that's a useful comparison. The development of the internet was driven by the state out of national security concerns, not market forces and was not widely used during the USSRs life, so I'm not sure that one is helpful to illustrate the OPs point either.
