KSE Institute Report: The Technology Is Not the Constraint, the Process Is
A new KSE Institute study maps more than 180 partnerships between foreign defense companies and Ukrainian manufacturers and shows which of them are delivering. The Kyiv School of Economics just published a study of how foreign defense companies are partnering with Ukrainian manufacturers and which of those partnerships are delivering.
Kudos to Natalia Shapoval and her team on this extensive research.
What KSE found: The landscape is large and fragile. KSE Institute counted at least 180 business-to-business partnerships since the full-scale invasion in 2022, and about 22 percent have already stalled. Most of them stall at an early stage. Drones lead the field at 26 percent of all partnerships.
The sharpest split is on the Ukrainian side of the house. Partnerships with private Ukrainian firms are about 96 percent active. With state-owned enterprises the figure is 62 percent.
The obstacles are familiar to anyone working in this space: fragmented authority, changing and unclear rules, export controls and unstable funding.
The report found that the building blocks exist. But what is missing is a predictable system: an easy-to-understand path for investors and partners and struggles around validating battlefield success and demand.
Our CEO, Edward Marshall, is a senior advisor at KSE and the report matches what our team sees on the ground.
The technology is not the constraint. It's the process piece that needs work.
Read the report:
