Ukraine’s Silicon Valley

Mankind has entered the digital age of information and needs cutting-edge developments in nanotechnology. Therefore, it is not surprising that Ukraine will launch its first innovation park this fall, to be called the Bionic Hill.

According to Platforma website, the Bionic Hill will be created by American and Ukrainian architects who participated in the Silicon Valley’s major projects, such as Google’s campus or the Stanford Business School. The Ukrainian industrial park will be constructed on the defunct military base’s site in Kotsiubynske, Sviatoshynsky district of Kyiv. The organizers intend to commission the park’s first buildings in 2015, providing jobs to about 35,000 IT specialists. The total area of the Ukrainian Silicon Valley will likely reach 147 hectares by 2020, with project costs of about 1 billion dollars.

However, the rose-colored vision of the project may fail to survive contact with the Ukrainian reality. Ukrainian bloggers are writing that industrial parks throughout the developed world have been created based on pre-existing universities’ resources and in cooperation with reputable IT companies. Skeptics do not believe that big industry players of, say, Apple’s caliber will take interest in the project. However, Platforma reports that the park itself claims to have already launched their project using the Kyiv Mohyla Academy’s resources and obtained promises of cooperation from many cutting-edge Western IT companies.