Young entrepreneurs united in an initiative for a better tomorrow in the often wrongly (yet continually) overlooked eastern Croatia, and Vukovar is where it is all happening.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sergej Novosel Vuckovic writes on the 17th of November, 2019, while Vukovar remembers the most tragic days of its not so distant past, all of Croatia pays its respects to the country’s hero city in the east. More than twenty years after the peaceful reintegration of Vukovar, raw and painful war wounds are still being treated in the city, not only when it comes to interpersonal relations, but also in terms of Vukovar’s local economy, which is far from what it was during the pre-war years.
But, as the quote says “flowers will grow from the blood and the pain,” there is a new generation of people in Vukovar who are not as burdened by what the city went through during the war. These people have a common characteristic in that they work with information and communication technologies, they have established companies in this decade and are already working globally – some create software for the American medical industry, others deal with campaigns for British clients who are developing artificial intelligence tools.
Now, they have decided to network, so that the whole east of the country can feel the same level of progress. Namely, the company Kod consulting from Vukovar and GoAds and Informatika Fortuno from Vinkovci initiated an idea back in the spring with the support of the Development Agency of Vukovar-Srijem County founded the VVIT Association (Vukovar-Vinkovci IT), aiming to develop the ICT sector there.
“We want to network local ICT companies with the aim of collaborating and sharing experiences through meetups and conferences, designing and conducting trainings and workshops to educate future professionals,” the president and vice president of the association explain.
“Due to the importance of the ICT sector, I believe that it deserves an equal place at the table with other branches – agriculture, timber industry, tourism. We’re involved in the development of the county’s development strategy, our goal is to create the preconditions for employment and the retention of experts in the field, and consequently the growth of the economy as a whole,” said the president Vice Božić and vice president Saša Salamon, recalling that the ICT sector, according to HUP, is second in terms of exports and the number of employees in Croatia.
“Respectable companies recognised globally operate in our county as well, and we want to show this through our own examples,” says Salamon.
He founded and owns Kod consulting back in 2012, which was declared by Deloitte as one of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa back in 2017.
A team of about 30 young people in Vukovar are testing and developing software, including Varian Medical Systems, a leading manufacturer of cancer treatment devices and software, and Glooko, which makes diabetes solutions.
GoAds was the county’s first digital marketing agency since 2015.
“We specialise in Google Ads/PPC advertising, web analytics and conversion optimisation, and we’re one of the leading GoGoogle Partner agencies in the Adriatic region,” says founder and CEO Vice Božić.
They are growing by 50-70 percent each year, and soon they are planning to move to a new space in the Business Incubator. They are looking to employ more people as currently, there are three of them in the agency, and finding new people is a special challenge in itself when operating in a smaller environment such as Vinkovci.
”So far, we’ve worked with over 200 clients from different sectors in Croatia – e-commerce, tourism, IT, health, and we’ve worked with those from Australia, the US and the UK, one of the last being Datasine from London, to develop tools that combine AI and psychology to predict consumer behaviour,” reveals Vice Božić.
The first concrete step of the association’s work was the recent meeting of county IT professionals in Vukovar.
“The VVIT Meetup brought together more than 50 IT professionals, demonstrating more than a strong interest in networking and sharing experiences. In 2020, we plan to organise an ICT conference, hold thematic meetings, thoroughly analyse all of the IT companies… ”, continues the president of the association.
Asked how the authorities, at the local level and at that of the state, can facilitate business, and in light of the Croatian Government’s announcement that it will also apply special laws in the Vukovar area that will approve specific incentives for investment, Salamon states that the association welcomes such a decision.
”However, we’d definitely like to see a faster realisation of what we’ve been promised. The ICT sector is changing very quickly and if we want to be competitive, the implementation of such laws needs to be much faster. We still have too much to pay out and many unnecessary issues, which ultimately reduce our competitiveness,” concludes Salamon.
According to CES and Fina statistics, Vukovar-Srijem’s economy is ”rising”. At the end of October, 5,750 unemployed people were registered in the county, which is 25 percent less than last year, the unemployment rate in 2018 was reduced to 17.6 and employment increased to 41.7 percent, but that is still poor. The number of entrepreneurs increased to 2,104, with more workers employed (19,699).
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