Accelerate: Ukraine / Ukraine Innovation Hubs
Summary
In 2024, AI for Good Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine, and partners committed $25 million to launch a series of economy-scale innovation hubs in Ukraine, physical campuses which provide space, access to expertise and specialized state-of-the-art equipment, a global network, and funding to Ukrainian entrepreneurs. The Hubs help to accelerate entrepreneurship, public-private partnerships, academic partnerships, and international connectivity to boost the capacity of Ukraine’s economy to stand up to Russian aggression and flourish. Throughout 2025, the Kyiv hub will be launched, and the first cohorts of companies and partnerships will be established, spanning international academic institutions, nonprofits, companies with experimental technologies, entrepreneurs, and the whole constellation of community stakeholders required to scale. Ukraine has enormous potential to be an industrial and innovative leader in Europe, and this commitment will help build the resources and ecosystems necessary to expand and accelerate Ukrainian-led economic growth.
Approach
The Ukraine Innovation Hubs are physical campuses across Ukraine. They provide the space, access to expertise and specialized state-of-the-art equipment, a global network, and funding needed to confidently take risks to build a brighter future.
This Commitment represents Phase II of the Ukraine Innovation Hubs project. The project aims to bring together the necessary resources and partners to pilot and develop the first hubs, proving that this concept is viable and can scale to have a significant impact on Ukraine’s economy, education sector, and overall resilience.
Phase II focuses on developing the network of first hubs, after raising the remaining required funds and resources. This Commitment will build the first prototype hub in Kyiv in collaboration with the Kyiv School of Economics and Kyiv Mohyla University by the end of 2024, with space and operational expertise committed, and funds willing to co-locate and bring some of Ukraine’s most innovative start-ups to the space.
Hubs are structured with physical infrastructure (along with labs and specialized equipment, and everything needed to experiment, develop, test, and productise innovations in focus areas for the region) , an operating entity that brings expertise and global connectivity to the community, and funds that provide capital to solve the most important problems and scale those solutions to impact society.
The many partners fall into buckets across these resources–from the capacity to provide expertise and network, to providing the physical spaces and investments needed. The hubs operate as centers of an innovation culture that is open to the broader community, offering opportunities to observe and participate, get training, apply to jobs, and generally contribute to the level of innovation in a particular sector.
Action Plan
This Commitment will launch the first full pilot of a physical innovation hub in Ukraine in 2025. The results will include building a center, hiring specialized staff, formalizing relationships with key scientific, business, and civil society stakeholders, and launching initial programmes to accelerate innovation through resource availability, collaborations, training, funding, and mentorship at the intersection of Ukraine’s critical industries, and the global scientific community.
The timeline for 2025 is:
February: finalize funding commitments, advisory board, core partnerships for the first hub, put in place local and international legal frameworks.
April: complete preparations in selected space in Kyiv, including resource and scientific equipment procurement and installation.
May to September: host the first cohort of projects, scientific teams, international collaborations, and contributing fellows. Open the space to the community for a constellation of training, job placement, ideation, and research activities, including international research seminars, workshops, and related events.
October to December: launch the second cohort, launch resources for projects that have completed incubation periods. Ensure that sector-specific priorities are well-defined and evaluation metrics are being collected effectively.
By late 2025 the Ukraine Innovation Hubs will operationalize the Venture Capital fund and design and launch a second hub, based on pilot results.
The Commitment aims to congregate ideas, prototypes, experiments, and unique products in the hubs, along with the expertise needed to bring those new ideas and technology to bear on Ukrainian society. The plan is to invite over 10 new teams to a space each month and offer training to prepare the community for emerging job opportunities. Operating at full capacity, the hubs will contribute to expansion of the innovation economy at a pace of 10 new positions per company (a rule of thumb in other accelerator programs) , creating up to 10,000 new jobs per year.
Background
The Ukraine Innovation Hubs initiative is a commitment to Ukraine’s long term economic capacity, ensuring the revitalisation and reinvention of the country’s core productivity pillars from the ground up, driven by Ukraine’s diverse and motivated local communities.
Russia’s illegal war of unprovoked aggression in Ukraine aims to erase a nation–ethnically, culturally, and economically. Strikes on energy grids aim to reduce productivity, strikes on schools aim to take away Ukraine’s future, strikes on libraries and publishing houses aim to destroy and rewrite history.
From this destruction, Ukrainians have emerged stronger, willing to fight, build, invent, think, learn, and work together to solve enormous and existential challenges. Ukrainian innovation has turned the tides of the war, enabled grain exports to reach similar volumes to 2021, created networks of underground production facilities, and even repaired US military equipment in the field without spare parts. Ukrainians do not lack the ability to innovate. Ukrainians lack the resources to effectively scale their innovation in Ukraine and around the world.
This commitment aims to address this problem by bringing capacity and resources to let the Ukrainian innovation ecosystem thrive. This is a model for resilient and sustainable economies that are able to adapt and address the needs of their local communities, driving demand for local goods and services, and becoming a model for 21st century, post-climate-crisis human societies.
Innovation Hubs’ Phase I was completed in May 2024, with the Innovation Hubs launch event hosted by UC Berkeley. This event brought together stakeholders from presidents of Ukraine’s top universities, members of the US and Ukrainian government, global funds, and startups committed to staying and growing in Ukraine. The event raised over $10 million in commitments, getting the initiative up and running, and reaffirming international support for Ukraine’s future.
Progress Update
Partnership Opportunities
Enabling innovation at the community level to thrive requires that the Ukraine Innovation Hubs put in place state-of-the-art infrastructure that will attract entrepreneurial minds to engage on topics of fundamental importance to their context, both intellectually, in the lab, and in the marketplace. This means that with academic-scientific partnerships, connection to expertise in each community of interest, and alignment with the regional and national priorities, the Innovation Hubs need capital, equipment, and venture funds in order to launch. Capital is the largest constraining factor due to investors being reluctant to invest in Ukraine during wartime, but this can be overcome and is fundamentally due to a flawed understanding of risk and current market dynamics in-country., The Innovation Hubs are open to the entire ecosystem of community actors required to promote, pursue, and develop innovations in society. As such, partners may participate by bringing resources, leveraging the hubs’ resources, or learning from the concept to replicate ecosystem structures in other regions or other focus areas.