“Large sum of money isn’t mandatory for realizing your idea” (video)
Information technologies sector is one of the rapidly developing branches of Armenia’s economy. New law giving tax privileges to the newly created companies of the IT sector can also contribute to it. Artashes Davtyan, Director of Microsoft Innovation Center, notes: “Newly created startups, which have been created in three months, are freed from all the taxes and their income tax makes up 10 percent, which allows the start-up to spend the money longer.” According to the data of Enterprise Incubator Foundation, in 2015 the information technologies sector has registered 20 percent growth, which cannot be only conditioned by state assistance. “The state can support, but startups themselves are the driving force to create their own success. If the startups don’t create their success, whatever the state does, they won’t be able to achieve success,” he says. Microsoft Innovation Center supports teams with good ideas in developing, becoming leaders in the sphere. PicsArt, Shadowmatic, Teamable, GG taxi, these already famous Armenian companies hadn’t even imagined that they would gain worldwide recognition. Artashes Davtyan notes, “None of them had 10, 20, 100 thousand dollars before start-up, simply starting from the first day they were determined to solve an issue, which they had seen.” Like the other developing countries Armenia also isn’t able to keep its specialists in Armenia. The outflow of specialists in this sphere is connected with global developments. “Imagine, Twitter takes programmers from weak companies. The weak companies take specialists from weaker ones and the latter from German companies, which involve employees from Armenia.” In order to raise the problems of Yerevan a group of young programmers is creating City Bugs project. Foreigners are also interested in it. The Co-author of the project Hovhannes Aghajanyan says, “We won in the contests of startups in Europe and the world. One of them is the World Summit Youth Award held in Brazil.” The team didn’t face obstacles for development. You should only have an idea and great desire to fulfill it. “There are no bad ideas, you should only work well and understand who will need that idea and when.” By the way, about 400 companies operate in Armenia’s Innovation technologies sector. 12000 specialists are involved in it and there are about 2000 vacancies.
