Highlights from NUCC’s study trip to Lviv
Seven Norwegian business representatives joined NUCC on a business trip to Ukraine in September/October to learn about the opportunities for business cooperation in IT.
Ukraine is about to become an attractive IT and outsourcing destination in Europe. Ukraine has Central and Eastern Europe’s highest number of IT engineers. The competence level is high and the prices are low. Global Sourcing Association (GSA) UK. recently nominated Ukraine as the offshoring destination of the year.
The program included participation at Lviv IT-arena, one of Eastern Europe’s largest IT-conferences, an introduction to politics and economy in Ukraine, opportunities in IT and meetings with IT-companies. The trip was organised for NUCC and ICT-Norway members. The participants represented Norwegian IT and innovation companies.
Lviv IT-arena is a three-day IT-event in Lviv every year. The event was filled up with interesting panel discussions, inspiring and motivational speakers like Alexander Nix, СЕО, Cambridge Analytica, Martin Eriksson, Founder of ProductTank and Co-founder and Curator of Mind the Product, Allan Grant, Co-Founder & CTO, Hired and many others.
Alexander Nix, СЕО, Cambridge Analytica talking about the importance and use of Big Data in elections and advertising.
Dagfinn A.Mork from Conscensia, Stein Thore Haga from Multimedía Nordic and Linda Oksnes from NUCC are talking about how to build efficient tech partnerships.
During the study trip the group also met representatives from the Lviv city administration. The participants learned about the business environment in Lviv, how the government facilitates business cooperation in ICT and other interesting topics.
The group visiting Lviv City Council.
The group visited Lviv Business School, where they learned about IT-competence in Ukraine. Yaroslav Prytula. Dean, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), presented the IT-education in Ukraine. Yaroslav could tell that Ukraine is number one in Central and Eastern Europe in number of graduated engineers annually. Artem Vilihura from Itera presented pros and cons of using Ukrainian IT-specialists and cultural differences. One of the advantages pointed out by Artem was the high competence in a wide variety of technologies, both common and rare, and the willingness to self-learning. A con is the large difference in salary between junior and senior level, in particular compared to Norway, which makes the latter more costly. The group also met many representatives from different IT companies.
“We traveled to Ukraine to look at the possibility of outsourcing IT services. On the trip with NUCC, we got an introduction to the Ukrainian IT industry, culture and, in addition, the opportunity to meet a wide variety of companies. We were especially pleased to learn so much about Ukraine and Ukrainian culture along the way. This made it much easier for us to maintain a good dialogue with the companies we met.”, Tellef Tveit from Learnlink
The participants also visited several IT companies, including N-iX, Conscensia and Innocode. All of them are member of NUCC and have experience with Norwegian and other Scandinavian clients.
One of the participants is trying to play virtual baseball in N-iX office in Lviv.
The N-iX team has created a VR simulation that would help professional quarterbacks (position in American football) train in realistic environments. Andrew Pavliv, a founder and CEO of N-iX, mentioned that the development such simulation has already caused great excitement in U.S, in particular, among national football league teams. The participants had the opportunity to play. It was fun, but clear that we need some more practice.
At Conscensia office in Lviv participants were listening to an interesting presentation about Cultural Differences presented by Delivery Managers Zoryana Drapaylo: ” How and why cultural intelligence is crucial to success in a diverse environment”. Also Yaroslav Rozhankivskyy gave an informative presentation on “Responsible Sourcing: a third way to success”. Fredrik Arthur, Counsellor – Deputy Head of Mission of the Norwegian Embassy in Kyiv took part and provided insight into political situation in the country.
The last day of the trip, the participants visited Innocode. In addition to an introduction to Innocode, two law firms, Arzinger and Advice Group gave the participants some legal advice. Roger Schjerva, chief economist in ICT Norway, summed up with a presentation about the Norwegian-Ukrainian relation in IT and some economics.
