The status, dynamics and specifics of the higher education development are significantly impacted by the social and economic context. The ongoing changes in the Russian economy are determined by the transition to the economy where information and knowledge play a decisive role and new knowledge generation serves as a source for the economic growth, basis for innovations and talent promotion that meet dynamically changing market needs. It is identified that in the knowledge economy universities take a fundamental position that turns them into basic elements of the National Innovation System enabling multiplicative knowledge augmentation and aligning with the education continuity and personalization along with commercialization of the intellectual activity results. The analysis of the foreign and domestic researches by D. Bell, M. Castells, A. Toffler, V. A. Inozemtsev, and B.Z. Milner allowed the author to identify modern economy features that provide solid grounds for the creation of a new higher education development paradigm determined by the growing integration processes in the "Education-Science-Production" system. The new education paradigm formation should aim to promote personnel training with specific attention to fundamental knowledge and its interdisciplinarity; attain high level of the professional training in the light of the transition from "Education for a lifetime" to "Education throughout life" concept; enable policy of the proactive talent development that will reduce interest disbalance in the labour market, disparity between specialist knowledge level and employer requirements and meet long- term talent needs of the real sector enterprises. The author highlights that talent training system development for the knowledge economy, from the content-oriented point of view, should be approached in two ways. First, higher school should train and retrain personnel for the specific employer actively engaging it into education process. Second, the higher school objective is to develop specialists who can initiate creation of new innovation products and technologies based on the enterprises established by them. The conducted researches enable the author to conclude that the level and scale of the raised social and economic transformation objectives, along with the objectives of the new education paradigm formation in particular, require more intensive integration processes in the "Education-Science-Production" system. Such system development should include market mechanism for the participants' mutual adaptation, create area of their interest intersection, meet all their needs to the maximum extent and promote synergetic effect of the collaboration.
