Top-Down or Bottom-Up? How Ukraine’s Brave1 Platform Redefines Military Innovation

Sammanfattning

This thesis conducts a study on military innovation in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 with a focus on its civilian-driven and digitally coordinated nature. It demonstrates the processes and mechanisms that the Ukrainian innovation undergoes and how that challenges the traditional top-down models of military innovation. The Brave1 platform is chosen as an empirical case as it is the most prominent and comprehensive structure in the modern Ukrainian defence-tech ecosystem. This thesis uses the classical military innovation theories combined with the more recent scholarship in the field of wartime adaptation as its theoretical framework. Thematic analysis of interviews given by the Brave1 officials, public statements by military representatives and other official policy material is employed. The findings of the thesis demonstrate that innovation in Ukraine derives, in its essence, from civilian developers and frontline units and is then formalised, scaled and integrated through institutionalised processes. The analysis conducted in this study concludes that the current state of military innovation in Ukraine can be characterised as a hybrid model, as it combines both the bottom-up features with the state coordination. This thesis contributes to the field of War Studies with a redefined way of perceiving the role of civil-military relations and their effect on the military during wartime. Finally, it emphasises the importance of further research within the field.