The first thing the field corrects is the language. What a conference in Washington calls an “innovation ecosystem” is, on the ground, a workshop with blacked-out windows, a procurement officer with a spreadsheet and no time, and a founder who ships a new airframe revision every three weeks because the last one stopped coming back.
My work in Ukraine began as a commercial thesis: the technologies being proven here would define the next decade of defense. It became something closer to a discipline. Keep showing up, keep listening, revise everything.
The work has two modes that feed each other. Advisory: helping Western investors, primes, and technology companies understand what the wartime market actually rewards, and connecting capital to capability across a gap neither side can read alone. Research: structured fieldwork for Innovation Under Fire, my King’s College London doctorate, tracing how innovation ecosystems behave when the feedback loop is measured in casualties rather than quarters.
The problems here are specific. How a drone team iterates against jamming that changes weekly. How autonomy behaves in denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited environments, which I presented on at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum. How procurement gaps open and close between ministries, brigades, and volunteer networks, and where a foreign partner can usefully stand in that flow without slowing it.
The geography is wider than the capital. I’ve worked across Ukrainian oblasts, east and south toward the line, west toward the border logistics hubs, in ministries, regional administrations, factories relocated into basements, and test ranges improvised from farmland. Each place holds a different piece of the same lesson: the front line is an argument about technology, conducted empirically.
The people are the asset that compounds. Ukrainian founders and engineers. Ministry and defense-forces stakeholders. The international residue of every serious defense-tech conference that now routes through Kyiv. I built these relationships in person, over years, and they’re why the research is first-hand.
The through-line runs outward: what is learned here is already reshaping how Taipei plans, how London theorizes, and how New York prices risk. Ukraine is the load-bearing wall of this career.