“Going Global: Israeli-Ukrainian Innovation Day,” held as part of Jerusalem Days in Kyiv, helped Ukrainians understand to some degree the secret of Israel’s success in this sphere. Opening the forum, the Ambassador of Israel to Ukraine Eliav Belotsercovsky said that the event was meant to share the two countries’ know-how in innovating. According to the ambassador, Ukraine and Israel have a great potential for cooperation in the field of science and technology, but its realization is a challenge. One of the problems, says Belotsercovsky, is that “your country was focused on energy, industry, agriculture while human resources remained neglected. Our experience revealed the importance of human resources. If you ignore them, you will have trouble developing.”
THE ECOSYSTEM OF INNOVATION
Following that, leading Israeli experts talked in excellent English for six hours on end about what makes the Israeli innovation ecosystem so successful and how it helps create start opportunities for exploring new markets, how women inspire one another to work in this sphere, how innovations affect education, and how the latter lays foundations for further innovations.
Roy Munin, co-founder of Made in JLM, a nonprofit organization, shared his experience of creating an ecosystem of innovation in Jerusalem. According to him, this NGO focuses on uniting entrepreneurs, startups, R&D centers, research institutes, service providers, and investors in Jerusalem. He told that they started with changing the outward perception of the city, which used to have a depressive air, and created Jerusalem’s positive image.
And only after that more and more companies started to come to Jerusalem, while government began to allocate grants for innovation. Munin mentioned that government will always control everything and usually fails, because it is important that the authorities took a proper place. “This is only possible if local or central authorities realize that they are part of a large ecosystem including other players, who can do things better,” said he.
Probably the most important thing in Munin’s opinion is instilling a cooperation culture among numerous players, including businesses, researchers, government officials, universities, service providers. Ad all those links matter in the process of creating an innovation ecosystem.
However, success is unattainable if society is strange to the psychology of accepting the other’s success and understanding how cool it is to cooperate with such people and do something better. In other words, Israelis managed to get rid of jealousy because of the other’s success.
Tom Bar Av, director of marketing and ecosystem at MassChallenge, the world’s biggest startup accelerator, emphasized another moment: in Israel, you do not take a failure as a disaster. According to him, this country even holds FuckDay, or losers’ day in other words, when people share their experiences. A businessman will not always become successful at once. A failure can become a stimulus to keep trying and in the end create a successful business.
Speaking on the role of state in supporting the ecosystem of startups, Av said that it need not necessarily provide financial support. It can be a lower rent for office areas for startups, or removal of obstacles to starting a business.
Av told that a smallish ecosystem of innovations could be created in two weeks, but you have to realize that you are running a marathon, not a sprint.
WOMEN AND INNOVATION
“We did not become a startup nation overnight. What helped was our entrepreneurial culture. Failures are a great honor and should not be feared. Someone could fail three or four times and still build a successful company,” says Naama Zalzman-Dror (29), director of business development at Vertex Ventures.
Inbar Weiss (35), director of a civil organization TheNewSpirit founded in Jerusalem in 2003, remarked that smart cities start with social innovations. She says that many creative people bring ideas that change a city’s reality, which is conducive to high technology.
She went on to say that such a high concentration of innovation in Jerusalem might be accounted for the fact that it is a totally insane city, where all sorts of conflicts happen almost on a daily basis. “The existence of different cultures forces you to co-exist in a different way, and this brings forth wonderful innovations. We are working to unite young people and urge them to go in for things which inspire them, so that they did not feel lonely in the city and wanted change. That is what we are creating platforms for innovation for,” said Weiss.
She emphasized that TheNewSpirit takes part in the development of professional communities which seek to change Jerusalem’s reality. According to her, different communities promote the development of creative economy, local businesses, and innovation in Jerusalem.
Speaking on the role of women and innovation, Weiss noted that in Israel, the private sector is not oriented towards the weaker sex. “Women are more industrious and efficient than men. They can multitask.”
Zalzman-Dror emphasized that running a household is more complicated then setting a startup. “Motherhood is entrepreneurship,” she said. “The more women are involved in innovation, the braver they become, and the world will become more complete.”
INNOVATION IN EDUCATION
Teachers in the system of education are conservative, and that is why entrepreneurship has to be “elicited” from them. This is the opinion of Lilac Wasserman from Mifras Educational Entrepreneurship Incubator which is working to improve the system of education via the development of initiatives, entrepreneurs, and the culture of entrepreneurship. She believes innovation and entrepreneurship underlie the development of the state system of education and take account of the challenges it faces. Meanwhile she emphasizes that changes or reforms in the system of education are impossible from the top downwards, they have to come from below and mean a change of thinking and perception.
“From kindergarten to school to university, we have a perception of the world the way it is, while an entrepreneur perceives it differently: they believe it is up to them to change reality,” emphasizes Wasserman.
She sees the way out in teachers becoming innovators who teach the children to express themselves emotionally, and most importantly, to dream. This is exactly what one very young teacher did at a primary/secondary school she was eager to change. And if there are lots of such teachers, we will have a new system of education, says Wasserman. She told that a program to introduce a project-teaching process has been implemented at Israeli schools. At first, this program was privately funded, and now state is involved as well.
The program envisages a selection of 30 school principals who have a potential to implement innovations at schools. “We train them in a special six-month course, after which they take another six months to prepare a curriculum which we adapt to a certain school. We ask the principal what their dream is and what is the goal they would like to achieve in six months, which challenges and needs the community faces, and what is the community’s ambition. During the next six months we find an innovative solution to fulfill the dream. Upon completing the first year, the principal has a business plan. It is an agenda of measures necessary to make the school innovative. Then we work on the budget, and if the necessary funds are granted by the ministry of education or any other foundation, in two years you get a different school, which becomes an incubator for educators,” explains Wasserman.
She adduced an example of implementing an innovative solution: decreasing the level of violence and at the same time raising performance at a very complicated Jewish-Arabic school in southern Israel. She said that 20 various solutions to stop violence had been analyzed and a dynamic pattern of education was chosen. Science suggests that the more students move around, the less they are prone to violence. Instead of 45 minutes, a class for 40 students lasted 15 minutes, and the rest of the time they studied math, physics, and language in motion. Of course, the teachers had to change the system and structure of material presentation. But in the end violence at that school decreased, and student progress grew considerably.
She went on to say that although leadership is easily accepted in Israeli culture, their incubator tries to teach educators and students the culture of entrepreneurship. However, it is not easy, and the reason is that changing a mindset is challenging.
And so it is, indeed. Yet we might say that Israelis quite agree with Socrates’ reasoning who said: “The secret to change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
