Article August 26, 2002 ISSUE

If they build it, it can grow

A daunting task from Day One—help develop an entrepreneurial climate in post-Soviet Ukraine

By Corvin Huber

Prior To Returning to the private sector and my academic roots in aviation engineering, I was partner in a European consultancy that ran government-to-government aid programs. One of our major assignments involved designing a program to help new entrepreneurs in the former Soviet Union start small- and medium-sized businesses.

These new ventures would either be spinoffs from existing industrial structures or service-related start-ups. In both cases, there were no working models in that part of the world—there were no smallor medium-sized businesses when the Soviet Union broke up, no individual entrepreneurs. Fostering entrepreneurship and company-building would all have to be done from scratch. The tasks looked, and in some ways still look, daunting.