December 6, 2019

Boston Friends of UCU host young Ukrainian entrepreneurs

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Roman Vaskiv

At the informational event in Brookline, Mass. are: (top row, from left) Ivan Petrenko, executive director of the UCU Center for Entrepreneurship, graduate student Oleh Smolkin, event host Vera Trojan, Alicia Szendiuch, Christine Balko Slywotzky, Lilia Hrabowych, (bottom row) Adrian Slywotzky, Yarema Wolosenko, student Yaryna Lyba, Valentyna Zasadko, director of the School of Public Management at UCU, Tania Vitvitsky and Alexander Kuzma, chief development officer at the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation.

BROOKLINE, Mass. – The Boston Friends of the Ukrainian Catholic University sponsored an innovative informational event on October 16 at a private reception in Brookline, Mass., hosted by Vera Trojan and Mark Carthy. The evening, which attracted some 50 guests and UCU donors, featured a forceful, dynamic presentation by Ivan Petrenko, executive director of the UCU Center for Entrepreneurship, who outlined an ambitious program designed to teach and promote entrepreneurial skills to UCU business school students to prepare them for the fast moving, competitive start-up world.

Mr. Petrenko was accompanied by two students, Oleh Smolkin and Yaryna Lyba, who were the winners of the best business plan pitch competition that was held at UCU earlier this year. The students, smart, motivated nascent entrepreneurs, presented their business plan: a breakthrough wireless, AI based contact and motion-sensing system for optimizing training and coaching of fencers, which is already being evaluated by the Ukrainian women’s national fencing team. The presentation was followed by very active discussions with members of the Boston business community.

The pitch competition at UCU, sponsored by Boston Friends of UCU member Ms. Trojan, was organized to focus attention on the entrepreneurship program. The winners were awarded a trip to Boston, where they were hosted by a family of UCU donors. During the week they were in Boston, the Friends of UCU organized a full week of meetings and visits to start-ups, business accelerators like Harvard’s iLab, and meetings with early stage and venture capital investors to give the students a close-up look at the start-up world in Boston.

The group came away with important information about the promise and challenges of initiating a new enterprise, and they will be bringing that insight back with them to share with their fellow students at UCU. Mr. Petrenko was able to establish several connections with entrepreneurship programs at Northeastern University and other schools in the Boston area, some of the best university-based entrepreneurial programs in the U.S. today, that will be very helpful in managing the evolution of the entrepreneurship program at UCU.

UCU students visit the Boston start-up Rise Robotics.

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