Fueling innovation in the Ukrainian tech landscape: how it was

On August 28, Ukrainian and global IT industry experts met at UNIT.City in Kyiv to discuss Ukraine’s technological potential and its role in supporting the economy during and after the war. They also discussed the interaction between the state, business, and education, as well as improving business efficiency with the help of AI, ML, and Lean Startup best practices.

Rhonda Schrader (Executive Director of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps), Yevheniia Klepa (Director of Innovation and Partnerships at SET University), Kyrylo Bondar (Partner at Unit.City Innovation Park), and Oleksandr Borniakov (Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine) discussed Ukraine’s potential as the next Silicon Valley and key changes that will contribute to the development of the IT ecosystem.

Iryna Volnytska, President of SET, spoke about the role of education in building a strong technological ecosystem in the country and highlighted the key challenges of the sector:

• Today, students receive only half (45%) of the skills required by companies;
• skills lose their relevance in 3-5 years;
• 7 out of 10 skills in demand are soft skills that are not taught at university.

However, at the same time, it is universities that facilitate the transfer of technologies from the “theoretical sector” of laboratories to the “practical sector” of businesses. For example, it was Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) that played an important role in the creation of Genentech and Google.

Therefore, the main task of educational institutions today is to update fundamental education and reduce the gap between learning and the realities of the commercial sector.

NSFIC Executive Director Rhonda Schrader and UC Berkeley Fisher Center for Business Analytics Executive Director Gauthier Vasser, who came from California to share their experience in improving business efficiency with the Ukrainian IT sector.

We are pleased that even in today’s challenging environment, we managed to attract experts from all over the world and facilitate the exchange of experience, which means we are moving Ukraine’s potential as an IT hub forward.