“Israel represents the greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today,” wrote Dan Senor and Saul Singer in their book, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, published in 2009.
Their claim remains well-supported: Israel’s surge in high-tech enterprise, though dramatic, has not been sudden.
“By the end of the 1990s, the Israeli high-tech cluster had achieved the same rank as Boston, Helsinki, London, and Kista in Sweden, second only to California’s Silicon Valley,” wrote Catherine de Fontenay of Melbourne University and Erran Carmel of American University in a study, Israel’s Silicon Wadi: The forces behind cluster formation. “At the core of the Israeli cluster lies…software, data communications, electro-optics, hardware design, and internet technologies. Related…industries include medical technology, bio-technology, agricultural technology, materials technology, and military technology.”
Scientists and Engineers, (per 10,000 members of the labor force). office of the Chief Scientist, Israel Ministry of Industry and Trade, 2001.
According to the study, Israel was the largest single foreign destination of American venture capital investments in 1999 as technology firms bought Israeli startups to bolster their technologies as they had once acquired in Silicon Valley.
The Economist reported in June that in the past two decades, Israel “engineered an economic miracle.” [Read more…]
