Back in 2016, after visiting a university incubator in Estonia, I returned to Ukraine with a simple idea: our students also need a space to test ideas, fail safely, and build things that matter.
For the first two years, we conducted small pilots at various universities. Students volunteered, formed informal communities, and initiated early projects. It was exciting, but also clear that creating a full-scale incubator in every university wasn’t realistic yet.
By 2019, we realized the model needed a shift. Instead of trying to “install” an incubator everywhere, we moved online and focused on what scales naturally — education. That’s how the idea of Entrepreneurial University was born: a structured academic course that replaces traditional incubation by teaching the core of startup thinking. We created a semester-long program, trained lecturers, and integrated the course directly into official curricula so it could run independently inside universities.
The real shift happened in the summer of 2020, when, with the support of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Ministry of Education, we introduced the new program to universities across the country. After we launched the course “Innovation Entrepreneurship and Startup Management,” we expected maybe a few universities to join. Instead, more than 140 applications were received in the first month alone. We selected 70, and by September, the course was already being taught nationwide.
Five years later, this model basically lives on its own. In some universities, the course is optional, in others it’s already mandatory, and every semester about 2000 students go through it. In total, more than 20000 students have taken the program, and many of them later join national startup competitions or build their first projects inside startup studios and incubators.
What began as a small experiment has quietly become one of the strongest drivers of Ukraine’s university startup movement.
What happens when universities and incubators join forces?
Ukraine’s university ecosystem is still developing, but early successes show how powerful embedded incubators can be when they work side by side with academic communities.
The incubator model combines structured mentorship, hands-on workshops, lab access, and networking opportunities. Students and researchers receive guidance on business modeling, market validation, pitching, and scaling their ideas, while embedded incubators foster a culture that encourages experimentation and iteration.
This framework allows academic projects to transition efficiently from lab research to market-ready solutions, and I am glad I can share more about some of them here.
Elomia Health
Elomia Health was born in 2019 from the founder’s personal experience with depression and a deep desire to destigmatize mental health care. He imagined a space where people could talk openly and launched an AI-powered chatbot that listens, understands, and supports 24/7. The journey actually started earlier, in 2018, when the team joined one of the first cohorts of our university incubator.
At that time, we were still testing offline models in different universities, including a pilot incubator in Kharkiv. Even during that early period our support for Elomia Health was pivotal in shaping their business model. Through the YEP! program, the startup received mentorship on structuring a subscription-based B2C service and later scaling it into B2B offerings for employee benefits. The incubator also guided their market research, pitching, and strategic planning, helping transform a personal idea into a viable product.
Today, Elomia Health serves over 45k users, with 98% reporting that talking with the AI “helped” them.
Lviv Hydrogen
Lviv Hydrogen started as a research project: the founder, a chemist and PhD student at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, turned his work on metal-hydride materials into a startup idea in February 2023. Through the YEP’s mentorship and Seeds of Bravery Program, the team created their first pitch deck, learned to assess the market, and defined a clear value proposition.
They also worked within the SID City Science Park at Lviv Polytechnic, which focuses on turning academic research into startup-ready technologies. The incubator provided mentorship, lab access, and prototyping resources that were crucial in moving from idea to prototype.
Today, Lviv Hydrogen develops demonstration modules for hydrogen storage using metal-hydride technology: 0.28 L volume, 1.8 kg weight, up to 70 bar pressure, storing around 24 g of hydrogen. The team has secured €60,000 in grant funding from Seeds of Bravery, filed a national patent, and plans to submit an international PCT application, moving toward TRL 6 after prototype validation.
Univera
Univera, a startup founded by students of Odesa Polytechnic, is building a seamless digital interface that connects universities with their students. What’s really cool is that the founders started as students volunteering in their university’s early offline startup initiatives, long before YEP moved everything online and scaled up.
Today, their solution is already active in 20+ universities, including Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Over the past year, the team has secured $12k through the Alliance of Democracies’ democratic technology pitch competitions and has received a €50k grant from Seeds of Bravery to further scale their impact.
How the university startup studios model works today
University incubators don’t succeed because someone sets a “model.” They succeed by changing the academic culture. In particular, I see a few recurring factors:
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- Embedding entrepreneurship in the curriculum. Formal courses alone don’t create startups, but they do normalize the idea that innovation is part of the academic community, not a special reward for a select few.
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- Creating consistent, guided practice. Hackathons, mentoring, and market validation workshops allow theory to become practice in a short period of time. Students learn by doing, failing, and repeating.
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- Providing access to spaces where building can actually happen. Labs, prototyping rooms, and science parks turn ideas into MVPs.
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- Cross-pollination between students, researchers, and industry. When chemists, engineers, economists and designers finally talk to each other, new ideas emerge that would never have emerged within the confines of a single department.
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- National coherence instead of isolated efforts. One incubator is a project, but dozens of universities working together become a full-fledged movement.
That’s why YEP positioned itself not as a single incubator but as a national catalyst, helping universities develop their own capabilities and models, rather than importing a single template.
What worked and what clearly didn’t
One of YEP’s key successes has been the launch and expansion of the “Entrepreneurial University” program. That year, 70 universities introduced courses on innovation and startup project management, aiming to develop an entrepreneurial mindset among students, involve faculty in practical startup education, and engage university administration in creating systemic change.
These early efforts showed that combining formal courses with hands-on activities (workshops, hackathons, and mentorship) creates an authentic culture of experimentation. Support from national partners, including government leaders, also helped signal that university entrepreneurship matters and is taken seriously at the national level.
At the same time, certain obstacles persist. Many universities publicly supported “innovation,” but internal structures were slow to move. First, bureaucracy often outpaced student enthusiasm. Some incubators lacked sustainable funding and remained dependent on grants. Second, changing mindsets is harder than launching programs, and cultural inertia is real — that’s why the work is far from done.
If Ukraine (and other CEE countries) want its universities to become true engines of innovation, we need more than isolated success stories. We need:
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- Sustainable funding models for university innovation offices;
- Integration between research labs and entrepreneurial programs;
- Stronger partnerships between universities and industry;
- National coordination, not fragmented local projects.
But above all, we need to continue to nurture the culture that began to take shape in those crowded rooms where students refused to sit and just listen, but wanted to build.
Because the future of Ukrainian innovation, or any other country in the region, will not be created by one incubator, one university, or one initiative. It will be created by a united, empowered national community of students, researchers, faculty, and partners who believe that universities can be the birthplace of real, impactful change.
