Instigate CJSC

Instigate started its activities in Yerevan, Armenia in 2004 as a non-commercial organization providing free high-tech education to university students and graduates. It later expanded into 10+ other cities in the region and during the 18 years of its operation trained more than 2500 professionals in the field of HW, SW, FW development, HW-SW codesign, Electronic Design Automation, CAD, IoT, Robotics and intelligent systems, and related fields. 500+ of them work in various companies incubated by Instigate during these years, some of which are Outsourcing companies (cache generators) and some are IP and Technology start-ups (products and custom solutions). The training program includes 300 hours of boot camp followed by 1-2 years of working in pair (extreme programming) with professionals, while also being paid for the internship and personal growth. Extreme Programming methodology allows to grow teams aggressively, at the same time achieve a very high level of collaboration spirit, and responsibility. Collective code ownership is achieved through frequent rotations of developers between tasks, subprojects, projects, and even divisions (SQA, Applications Engineering, R&D, Tech-writing). Pair programming allows to maintain productivity during rotations because only one member of the pair is rotated - after learning the job, and training the replacement. Extreme programming allowed Instigate to grow by a factor of 4x yearly, starting from 11 in 2005, 45 in 2006, and 170+ in 2007. After saturating at 300+ in 2008 Instigate did not stop its training activities but started offering the R&D team creation services to external organizations, and foreign companies who are willing to build their own R&D subsidiaries in Armenia. Recently we completed a 2-year large-scale project, during which we created 4 R&D centers for a large semiconductor company. Today Instigate positions itself as Venture Studio and a Gateway to Armenia's IT industry.