Managing Government and Venture-Backed Startups in The Innovation Ecosystems of Developing Countries: A Project Management Framework

This article develops a project management framework for startups financed jointly by public money and venture capital in the innovation ecosystems of developing countries. The argument proceeds from a single premise: public capital and venture capital are not substitutable resources but distinct instruments with different risk tolerances, time horizons and success criteria, and treating them as interchangeable is the source of the most common failures in state-supported startup programmes. The article identifies four governance defects observed across developing-country ecosystems — the inter-stage gap, misaligned measurement, the absence of an exit channel, and the persistence of grant dependence — and proposes a stage-gate architecture in which the financing instrument, the decision-maker and the performance indicator all change at defined transition points. The framework is applied to the case of Uzbekistan, whose startup and venture ecosystem has expanded rapidly and whose stated targets to 2030 imply a change in the structure rather than the volume of support. The article concludes with a set of design propositions concerning the allocation of decision rights, the leverage ratio as the central control indicator, and the sequencing of reform.