The entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Ukraine: challenges and opportunities when launching IT companies

Abstract

Ukraine is a country with a complicated past and a politically uncertain future. Despite having once been a part of the former USSR, Ukraine today is a largely pro-European country that in recent years has become internationally known for revolution, open conflict with Russia, and vast, systematic corruption. However, there is a completely different side to the country that the majority of outsiders remain completely unaware of. Ukraine is becoming increasingly known in the IT sphere as one of the fastest growing IT outsourcing locations and the home for several close to Unicorn startups. “Over 100 global telecom, eCommerce, software development, and gaming companies have R&D offices in Ukraine, including Grammarly, Magento, Ericsson, and Crytek. The country boasts the greatest percentage of software engineers in Central and Eastern Europe.” says the article by payment processor Payoneer Inc. (2018). The main objectives of this master thesis are to define what shapes the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Ukraine, its development and what unique traits it has. Through this, I endeavor to explore and analyze the challenges and opportunities Ukrainian IT startups face when launching and developing businesses, as well as to provide recommendations that will have an impact on the further harmonious development of this ecosystem. The whole analytical work done in this thesis is structured based on Isenbergs entrepreneurial ecosystem framework (Isenberg 2011), which has: 1) Helped to build a proper logic structure for further recommendations 2) Defined all the stakeholders, the conditions of the ecosystem and their mutual impact 3) Led to the finding of missing, previously uncovered areas in literature, which, in turn, led to the formulation of a unique questionnaire for startup founders which allowed for unique research.