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Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is a strange place. My initial impression was “This place feels like home” i.e. like Bulgaria. We passed the border with Croatia at Gradiska and the first thing we saw was an Orthodox church followed by a tall, slender minaret poking out a few meters down the road. And remnants of war? I thought those will strike me most, but when you cross the border, you're overwhelmed by the liveliness of this place. People having loud conversations in cafes, driving up and down in their noisy cars, music blasting from squeaky speakers.... Yes, this place is loud and Banja Luka is the epicenter of it. The capital of Republic of Srpska is literally bustling with life. But we didn’t travel all this distance for sightseeing, our objective was to find out what’s happening with startups here. Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a big surprise that the tech startup scene isn’t as lively as the streets of Banja Luka, but there are things happening. 

We met with Vladimir Corda from Innovation Centre Banja Luka (ICBL). ICBL was co-founded by Athene Project Management, a business consultancy from Norway, together with 5 local state institutions, including the Ministry of Science and Technology, local universities and the city of Banja Luka. 

The centre offers incubation programs, business development services, as well as relevant training and is probably the best thing that happened to local startup minds. There are lots of challenges as there is neither venture capital nor as many innovative ideas as they would wish for, but they dream big and they fight the stigma on Bosnia. ICBL aims at becoming the driving force of innovating business in the Republic of Srpska. And things are slowly happening. Four months ago BosAngels - the first angel investors network was established. There are also 6 companies that are now incubated in the centre. We met with the developers of Codaxy, one of the Incubator’s tenants. Born out of the internal IT department of Republika Sprpska’s stock exchange, the developers have formed an indepedent startup, focused on building a .NET framework for stock exchanges and business service applications world-wide. Thanks to ICBL support, the three guys at Codaxy enjoy lowered rent and startup support, and are using the opportunitities to present their framework at conferences in Bosnia and abroad.

What Bosnia obviously suffers most from, and Vladimir reaffirmed this, is the bad name. Investors just don't come here, and even retailers in the US sometimes refuse to ship, because they think it's a "war country". And that's where the opportunity lies: if you go beyond prejudices, there's a lot of talent and value at good prices in BiH.

As the stories here are about tech and social media - we also enquired about social media penetration in BiH. You remember what I said in the beginning - this is a strange place. Right, about social media?! Twitter is unheard of. Blogging is a mystery. Facebook users count for 500 000 out of ...uh? This is a bit of a problem - no one knows how many people live in the country. The last census was done in 1991 and after that there are only guesstimates - 4 million, 5 million...we don’t know. Another interesting fact is that the number of public administrators is 5 times above the European norm. Too bad so many people work and yet there's no vision for this country. And this is generally the problem I saw here - many smart, well-educated people, impeccable products, but no no vision (yet).