Beyond Return

How Displacement Is Changing the Geography of Entrepreneurship

When entrepreneurs leave a country, their businesses do not necessarily leave with them.

A founder may relocate, while employees, suppliers, customers, capital and professional relationships remain spread across several places. The business can continue to draw on one economy while growing inside another. Over time, the connection between where an entrepreneur lives and where their economic activity takes place becomes increasingly difficult to define.

Ukraine offers a particularly clear view of this shift. The scale of displacement has forced entrepreneurs to rebuild across borders, creating businesses and networks that can remain connected to Ukraine while operating from elsewhere.

UCL’s The Next Generation of Entrepreneurs for Ukraine, launched in 2023 and supported by European Union, provides one of the places where this changing landscape can be observed. By 2026, the programme had expanded beyond supporting early-stage entrepreneurs to examining what influences the relocation and scaling of Ukrainian businesses.

What looks like a story about displacement therefore opens onto a different issue: whether economic belonging still has to follow geography.

Return is not the whole story

For Ukraine, return has understandably become one of the central ideas in discussions about displacement and recovery.

Will people come back? What will encourage them to return? How many businesses will be rebuilt inside the country?

These are important measures. But they can also make economic reconnection look more geographically simple than it really is.

An entrepreneur living in London may still employ people in Ukraine. A company established in Britain may continue working with Ukrainian suppliers or contractors, while relationships with investors, universities and customers in the UK can open opportunities for people and businesses in Ukraine. A founder may incorporate a company in one country, work with a team in another and sell into several markets, drawing on knowledge, capital and networks that cross borders. The business can therefore become part of several economies at once.

This is increasingly recognised in research on displacement and migration. The OECD has examined the role of diaspora entrepreneurship, investment and transnational networks in Ukraine’s recovery. The World Bank has also documented how displaced entrepreneurs can contribute to host economies while maintaining economic links with their countries of origin.

The distinction matters because physical presence and economic contribution are not the same thing.

A business can belong to more than one place

We tend to think of a business as belonging to one place. It has an office somewhere, employs people in a particular labour market, sells to particular customers and attracts investment from somewhere. Its economic contribution is then usually counted within that country.

Cross-border entrepreneurship makes those categories less tidy.

None of this is entirely new. Multinational businesses have operated across borders for decades. What is changing is the scale at which an individual entrepreneur can do something similar.

Digital tools, remote work, international finance, global professional networks and easier access to knowledge have reduced some of the practical barriers. Displacement has pushed this possibility much further, because people have had to build economic lives across borders rather than simply within them.

Ukraine is a particularly visible case.

From diaspora to distributed entrepreneurship

There is a useful difference between diaspora entrepreneurship and what is emerging here.

The traditional idea of diaspora often centres on maintaining ties with a country of origin: family, culture, community, philanthropy, perhaps investment.

Entrepreneurial networks can be much more active.

These networks can carry knowledge and opportunities across borders, linking people who might otherwise never meet – customers and suppliers, founders and investors, researchers and businesses. They also make it possible for someone living abroad to remain economically connected to Ukraine without being physically there.

This creates something closer to a distributed entrepreneurial ecosystem.

It also changes how we think about the entrepreneur.

A displaced founder is not necessarily an economic actor who has moved from one national system into another. They may be operating between systems, using the advantages of each and maintaining relationships with both.

That position can be difficult to capture in national statistics.

A person is counted somewhere. A company is registered somewhere. Employment is recorded somewhere.

The network connecting all three is much harder to measure.

Institutions become part of the network

Something of this dynamic can already be seen in UCL’s programme for Ukrainian entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs who come through the programme enter a much wider environment than a classroom or a campus. They meet researchers, other founders, business leaders and people connected to different markets. Some of those relationships may lead somewhere immediately; others may become useful much later, in a different country or for a different venture.

The value of these connections is difficult to capture in the usual description of an entrepreneurship programme. A university may provide knowledge and skills, but it also puts people into networks that can continue working long after the programme itself has ended.

For entrepreneurs whose businesses already cross borders, those networks can become part of the infrastructure of the business itself. UCL’s programme is a small but revealing example of how entrepreneurial ecosystems can be connected through institutions, even when the people within them are no longer concentrated in one place.

When economic capacity leaves the country

There is a harder side to this shift.

When entrepreneurs leave, a country can lose skills, employers, taxpayers, networks and future investment. Displacement can weaken local ecosystems, particularly when founders who might otherwise create companies and jobs are suddenly operating elsewhere.

That loss should not be disguised by the fact that some economic connections remain.

But the opposite assumption is equally incomplete: that once an entrepreneur leaves, their economic contribution has effectively left with them.

A founder abroad can become a bridge to another market. They can bring international customers to Ukrainian companies. They can hire Ukrainian specialists. They can invest in Ukraine. They can introduce Ukrainian businesses to international partners.

Over time, the economic value created by one person may therefore sit across several countries.

This creates an interesting mismatch.

Economic systems are still largely organised around territories. Entrepreneurial activity increasingly operates through networks.

The company registration remains in one jurisdiction. The people creating value may be spread across several countries. The customer may be somewhere else. The investor somewhere else again.

The map of the economy and the map of the business are beginning to diverge.

Ukraine as a signal

It would be easy to treat this as a temporary response to an extraordinary situation.

Some Ukrainian entrepreneurs will return. Some will establish permanent lives elsewhere. Others will continue operating between countries.

There is no reason to expect one outcome.

That uncertainty may itself be significant.

The generation of entrepreneurs shaped by displacement could develop businesses that never fit neatly into a single national ecosystem. Their experience may make cross-border operation less of an exception and more of a normal starting point.

Ukraine is not proof that every economy is moving in this direction. It is, however, an unusually clear place to observe the dynamics because displacement has forced them into view.

The same pattern can appear in less dramatic circumstances: migrants building companies across markets, founders keeping teams in their country of origin while operating abroad, diaspora investors connecting capital to local businesses, international graduates creating companies through relationships formed in universities far from home.

The infrastructure for this already exists.

What displacement changes is the number of people who have a reason to use it.

Beyond return

This leaves Ukraine with a rather different economic landscape from the one implied by a simple return narrative.

A person can live abroad and remain part of the country’s entrepreneurial economy. A company can be incorporated elsewhere and still depend on Ukrainian talent. International networks can carry economic value back into a country without requiring the people who built those networks to move home.

None of this makes return irrelevant.

It makes return one form of reconnection rather than the only one.

For generations, we have tended to locate economic capacity geographically: in cities, regions and countries. Entrepreneurs are increasingly making that assumption harder to maintain. Their businesses can stretch across borders even when their founders do not think of themselves as running “international companies”.

The most interesting legacy of displacement may not be measured by how many entrepreneurs eventually return.

It may be visible in the networks they leave behind and in the economic relationships they continue to create from wherever they happen to live.

A border can tell us where a person lives. It tells us much less about where their economic value goes.