Oleksandr Akymenko

Visiting Ph.D.

Boucher Management and Entrepreneurship

Oleksandr Akymenko is an entrepreneur and academic whose work spans strategy, management, design innovation, media, and public policy. He is co-founder and managing partner of Yes&Innovations, a design and innovation consultancy, and a doctoral candidate at the Kyiv School of Economics (Kyiv, Ukraine), where his research focuses on military technology innovation practices and management. He has lectured at the Ukrainian Catholic University Business School (Lviv, Ukraine) since 2017 and serves as Adjunct Professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), contributing to programs at the intersection of business, leadership, and social transformation. In 2026, he taught a Strategic Management class at the University of Connecticut (UConn, Storrs, Connecticut). He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Deep Tech Security Accelerator (DTSA), a Silicon Valley-based program operating in partnership with SRI International that supports battle-tested defense and dual-use startups as they scale into allied markets.

Prior to his current roles, Oleksandr was a JSK Fellow at Stanford University (2015–2016), where he, together with his wife Kateryna and the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, co-founded the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program, an initiative he helped to develop through 2022. He has held editorial leadership positions at Forbes Ukraine, where he served as Deputy Editor-in-Chief, and co-founded http://platfor.ma/, an independent Ukrainian media outlet.

His work connects practice and scholarship across design thinking, innovation management, civil society development, and defense technology policy in the context of Ukraine’s ongoing transformation.