Opinion | Start-up nation: Are there lessons to be learned from Israel’s tech success?
- A risk-taking culture, growing talent pool, state support and military training have shaped Israel’s hi-tech industry
Israel has almost the same number of artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups as China, but with a population that is 159 times smaller. It is a global leader in cybersecurity, developed drip irrigation, the USB flash drive, long-shelf tomatoes and the pill cam.
In short, Israel punches way above its weight class on the global stage in technology and innovation. Last week, I went on a trip organised by the Israeli foreign ministry and visited the country’s top university, promising start-ups and the biggest tertiary hospital in the Tel Aviv area to learn about its use of AI, as well as attended the OurCrowd summit in Jerusalem. I hoped to see if there was a secret formula to the nation’s success, and by extension, whether the formula could be replicated in other countries.
The answer to that is important as countries worldwide grapple with the question of how to seize the opportunities thrown up by new technologies from genomics to AI, and minimise the disruptions that these innovations invariably bring to societies and economies.
My conclusion from the week: there are aspects to the Israeli story of disruptive innovation that are unique to the country, but there are also many lessons that other nations can learn from.
In talking about Israel’s tech ecosystem, the role of the military looms large. Whether it is the compulsory national service that trains its young men and women to work in teams and be mission-oriented, or giving those serving in specialised units like signals intelligence a grounding in skills that are applicable to private industry like cybersecurity, the military almost always comes up in conversations about the secret of Israel’s tech success.
