Networks for technologists

 

Successful, with the courage to fail: Israel is a high-tech country from which Germany can and is looking to learn a great deal. This is evidenced by the increasing number of networks.

 

It was back in the 1990s that Israeli IT inventions successfully entered the world market, namely with the USB stick and instant messaging service ICQ. Today Israel has the world’s greatest concentration of high-tech start-ups per capita. According to British magazine “The Economist”, around 1,000 new companies are founded there every year. Gregor Schlosser would like to see young Germans take a leaf out of this book, following the Israeli example. He manages the platform Betatec on behalf of the German-Israeli Chamber of Industry and Commerce. “Although Beta stands for Berlin-Tel Aviv, because they are the hottest hubs,” he says, “it actually refers to the whole of Germany and whole of Israel.” The primary aim of Betatec is to network the two IT scenes with each other. The initiative is supported on a voluntary basis by Israelis Mickey Steiner from RWE Israel Innovation Center and Eran Vanounou from IT firm LivePerson and German Wolfgang Hisserich from Deutsche Telekom.

 

German hesitance to go into business with an idea, thinks Schlosser, is also down to “being marked by failure for your whole life in Germany.” In Israel, in contrast, failure is part of business. Here people are of the opinion that every failure makes you smarter. The one or other legendary founder had no other choice. “None of us had a job. What were we supposed to do?” This quotation is attributed to Jair Goldfinger, who founded the company Mirabilis around 20 years ago. Shortly after its establishment he and his three co-founders, all in their mid-20s, made a fortune when they sold ICQ, the first Internet-wide instant messaging service, to AOL for more than 400 million dollars. After that an IT gold rush broke out in Israel. Thousands of young people sought to copy the four successful entrepreneurs, learnt programming and dreamt of the next big innovation.

“In many areas today Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs are way ahead” of German founders, says Schlosser. For this reason Betatec, founded in 2014, aims to facilitate more intensive exchange between young entrepreneurs in both countries. “We organize pitch events where young Israeli firms present themselves to German companies,” relates Schlosser. Moreover the Betatec team organizes trips to Israel for German company delegations to gather information.  

 

The latest Betatec project is called “The new kibbutz”. From August 2015 German students will be able to complete an internship at start-ups or larger firms in Israel, with financial support from the Israeli Consulate General in Munich and Bavarian state government. “The idea was to create a modern alternative to voluntary service, which was very popular in the past, in a farming community,” states Schlosser.

Deutsche Telekom was among the German companies that recognized the potential of the Israeli IT sector early on. “The company approached us in 2004 with a request for project proposals,” recalls Professor Bracha Shapira, head of the Department of Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. The Israelis did not keep them waiting long. They wanted to ensure “more online security,” says Shapira, even though cybersecurity and solutions to virus attacks were not yet a major issue then. It was online purchasing that led to a strong increase in virtual threats. Deutsche Telekom nonetheless immediately gave the green light for the first project, initially scheduled for three years. Many more projects were to follow.

 

Today the Telekom Innovation Laboratories are located in Beersheba’s new Advanced Technologies Park, a five-minute drive from the university campus. In the corridor a simulator demonstrates the virus hunting process, while students sit at their computers behind glass walls. A conference room is furnished with comfortable white armchairs and has screens for video links. There is even a weights room and showers. “This is the new face of the universities,” says Shapira. Research and industry go hand in hand here, she adds. The IT specialist likes the application-oriented research work with the company: “We are dealing with real problems.”

 

Around 100 Israelis – teachers, research staff and students – are involved in the Deutsche Telekom projects, in which “umpteen million euros” have been invested since the beginning of the cooperation, reports Netta Cohen, responsible for marketing the university’s research findings. The German-Israeli project groups communicate weekly via video conference, and of course also via email and telephone.

David Ben-Shimon is a PhD student at Ben-Gurion University and also co-founder of the Israeli research firm Yoochoose Labs. It was ultimately the result “of a Telekom Laboratories project,” notes the IT specialist. While studying, Ben-Shimon was involved in developing a patent together with two other students which Deutsche Telekom subsequently sold to the founders of the German firm Yoochoose. “And they went looking for us.” From there it was just a small step to the founding of the Israeli subsidiary.