To answer this, I need to make a distinction between "development" and "innovation".

I'll also mention a related answer on Soviet living standards I wrote last week, but I'll try to summarize here.

It is absolutely true that the Russian Empire was accepted as a Great Power, and a military power. It also was undergoing a process of industrialization that started roughly around 1890, especially under the oversight of Sergei Witte.

But that doesn't mean it wasn't still a poor country. To repeat some figures historian Stephen Kotkin gives for around 1880: Russia was the fourth or fifth largest industrial power at the time (because of textiles), and was the largest agricultural producer, but these were mostly effects of its immense size - GDP per capita is estimated to have been at 20 percent of Britain's and 40 percent of Germany's. The average lifespan in the country was around 30, which was higher than British India (23), but lower than Britain (52), Japan (51) and Germany (49), and about the same as China's. It also had a literacy rate around 30 percent or so, which was equivalent to where Britain had been over a century previously. Easily nine-tenths of the people in the country lived rural, agricultural lives.

Even with the industrialization and urbanization that happened from 1892 to 1913 or so, these standards were still the baseline that the Russian Empire was working with, and it's important to note that the period 1914 to 1927, with the First World War, Russian Revolution, and attendant famines and dislocations, there was significant deurbanization and deindustrialization. Don't quote me on this but I think the estimate for population decline in St. Petersburg over those years is something like 50% - a lot of people moved back to their ancestral villages because of war, revolution, and shortages. On top of this, it's worth noting that what would be the Soviet Union in 1922 did not include a lot of the more developed western parts of the former Russian Empire, such as the Baltics, Poland or Finland.

So when Soviet power was consolidated, they absolutely were focused on economic development, but first a big part of that development was trying to get the economy back to its 1913 levels. It did eventually surpass those levels but I think it's important to keep that historic context in mind.

Another point based off of this. The USSR was absolutely what we would today call a developing country. For its entire existence (and this frankly goes for the post Soviet states to this day) it was essentially looking to catch up to advanced economies. This is not an easy thing to do, and most developing countries tend to fall into what's called the "Middle Income trap" - in short, the easy part is to climb out of poverty to a middle income level of development, but much harder to push past that to the absolute forefront of developed economies. The economist Simon Kuznets once said that there are four types of economies: rich ones, poor ones, Japan and Argentina, with the implication that Japan was unique in going from a poor to rich country, and Argentina was unique in going from rich to poor. There really haven't been too many examples added to the Japan category except South Korea or Taiwan. Even taking things like HDI (which I discuss here) which account for non-economic factors like life expectancy and education levels, the USSR was "high" but never at the highest levels of advanced economies, but rather at around the same levels as Mexico or Argentina.

A further point is that while the Soviet economy achieved impressive growth levels, especially after 1945 (Robert Allen argues in Farm to Factory that the USSR was actually one of the most successful developing countries in the 20th century because of these growth rates), these rates steadily declined with each decade starting in the late 1960s. While "stagnation" can be overrated - the Soviet economy pretty much consistently grew every year until the late 1980s - it was growing at ever smaller rates, with ever smaller returns on capital investments. It was being surpassed by other countries such as Japan itself in this time as well. So while I think the idea of the Soviet command economy being a dysfunctional basketcase on the verge of inevitable collapse is overrated, pretty much everyone in the USSR with knowledge of the West was aware that the the country's living conditions simply were not catching up with advanced economies like those in Western Europe, let alone surpassing them (which Marxist-Leninism had said would inevitably happen). If anything, the gap was growing with the tech revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, and Khrushchev's prediction that the USSR would achieve full communism by 1980 became something of a bad joke. But that leads us next to innovation...