Caminhos da Inovação - Israel: a potência inovadora da Startup Nation

[Music] the Israeli Innovation Journey actually starts before statehood when Jewish people had a lot of history but very very little geography on May 14 1948 the state of Israel was born a small country with very little resources and a very wounded population of immigrants from around the world who flocked to Israel with the purpose of rebuilding the Jewish land 2021 the state of Israel is only 73 years old the population has just crossed the 9 million mark But despite being very young and relatively small paradoxically the country is responsible for a non-proportional part in the global Innovation ecosystem what was it in Israel's Journey that led the country to this position whether any other options I think our journey really comes from Necessities that necessity drives you to use your brain power to compensate for everything that you lack either it's food or water or energy or defense or economy or peace you need to use your brain power to achieve those for thousands of years Jewish people were immigrants and immigrants are entrepreneurs by definition because they come somewhere new or they have nothing and they have to build their life build their to create practically everything from zero when you now talk about Innovation it's about the creation of the country that was an Innovative step I mean to create a country from zero to something and you did some Innovation but I don't I'm almost sure that those people who started Israel never thought of it as a startup project or innovation project it was a survival project and it was an amazing survival project [Music] you can identify five steps of innovation the first one starts with herzl when hertzel had a vision to create a nation state for the Jewish people and the first part of innovation was what kind of culture what kind of a society we want one of the Key conditions for open Innovation is diversity you need different people from different places from different approaches Israel is probably the home of diversity because when Israel was founded we had many immigrants come from all over the world a good entrepreneur is one that jumps without a parachute and builds a parachute before and the reason he has no other choice I think this is what's so unique about Israel in 48 we started we knew we have no choice it's either life or innovation we have to be more Innovative and we have to fight to make it work and I think this is the spirit that eventually drives a lot of the Innovation here we have something quite unique that everyone are born with we call it so hotspot is a combination of many things probably audacity and when you have a crazy idea you go after it even if it's crazy and once you fail you try again and we don't study this at school this is something we are born with the third step for me is all about security and Defense building our defense industry since we have nothing that can protect us naturally no mountains or valleys or oceans or Stormy Weather we had to create a defense Shield that that is made of brain power if you want to achieve long-term sustainability you have to achieve peace if you have to achieve peace you have to have deterrence so his ultimate goal was to bring Israel to an age of peace in order to do that you needed to have strong defense industry its path was as follows the young States need for a strong Army and protection from its neighbors LED it to develop entirely security focused Industries this required a lot of initiative audacity and Innovation the nuclear reactor was built satellites were developed and successfully launched for security and communication cyber security was developed to the highest level projects such as the arrow the lazy and of course the Iron Dome changed the face of the country the fourth step in our journey is the economic one which started in the economic collapse or the implosion in 1984 when our inflation rate Rose to about 450 percent and the whole economy was collapsing and out of that the Israeli capitalism or the venture capital of the startup Nation really started to be created with global Enterprises coming to Israel we were a few individuals playing the high tech game in the early 90s early 90s I mean uh Innovation and startups and exits that wasn't the culture at all I mean there was maybe one early 90s maybe there was one venture capitalist fund semi-governmental and a few crazy players who played the game we came here with quite a small land arid environment and hostile environment and we needed to basically serve ourselves Israel is quite is an island it's not geographically an island but doesn't it's an island de facto or so many of the things we developed because of necessity but this created quite a substantial impact first of all it enabled life and prosperous life in Israel second it created the mindset of innovation that we can do it ourselves one of the great advantages of Israel is the economy of small scale we're a small country geographically population wise but we're very diverse very close by geographically people know each other and those who don't know each other know the people who do know each other and this network of knowledge languages research areas in initiatives areas startup areas when they converge we can create change much much quicker and when you have such a small country and you don't innovate for your own needs because your Market does not exist the market is global then you create a global interest in what you do so whatever Israel does is not only for itself even if it's agriculture or water or energy or cyber security or Mobility anything is actually can be implemented on a global basis and so we suffered from on one hand from not having a market on the other hand it was a bless because you cannot innovate for little things what you innovate is on a global scale and it attracted investors it attracted Global Enterprises it attracted a lot of interest in what we do here this was created also by government policy at the time in the early 90s that basically the government took risk and developed the Israeli Venture Capital industry and today it's a it's a it's a substantial industry that is also very important in this ecosystem we have a budget of an annual budget of about with around 600 million US dollars that we annually allocate to the Israeli industry we provide grants to single entrepreneurs we provide grants to transfer of Knowledge from Academia to Industry and we provide grants to companies all sizes in all areas in all sectors this is a very stable government policy that has been since the 70s the fifth one for me is leveraging our journey of innovation for collaboration on a global basis for creating a new reality a new tomorrow for us in other nations in the region in order to innovate you need to tap into new kinds of intelligence we all know that IQ is important so to innovate you need to be intelligent we all know that emotional intelligence is also very important especially for leaders I think that we need to tap into a third kind of intelligence I call this um your network intelligence NQ so when you have a big challenge you go to your IQ your EQ but also to the power of people because at the end we are smarter than me Israel has a mandatory Army service most of the people today in the Army go to the intelligence unit and create knowledge and innovation during their army service so very easy to adapt it then to civilian life and so this is one component we have very good universities we have eight research universities in Israel and they also are very well connected to the local ecosystem and to the local innovators and entrepreneurs so there is also the knowledge coming from universities we have multinational companies that are substantial part of this ecosystem and we have today also a lot of startups and growth companies in Israel today we see many Israeli startups that have developed into larger companies into big companies and even unicorns and one very important component also is the Venture Capital industry Israel today is one of the leading Venture Capital sites in the world Science and Technology are amongst Israel's most developed sectors the country has spent 4. 3 percent of its GDP on Urban research and development the highest ratio in the world is the home to major companies in the high-tech industry and has one of the world's most technologically literate populations in the seven decades of its existence Israel attributes to this investment some of its leading Innovations and exports to the world not only Technologies but also leading technological human capital [Music] foreign [Music] started over 55 years ago in the south of Israel in the kibbutz called the khazarib and it started we say that most Innovation starts from a necessity so it started out of necessity wanted to start growing crops in the desert this is in highly highly arid area high temperatures saline soils very difficult to grow crops in that region and they joined we teamed up with a person by the name of simcablas and together they developed what is now called drip irrigation and we're able to start growing crops and Achieve yields and quality that was not possible prior to that and when they understood that they had a product they started looking how to expand initially inside Israel Sam was established in 1965 in nagav the desert area of Israel today 4 300 people work in its 29th subsidiaries and 90 manufacturing plants spread across 110 countries worldwide thus far netifim has irrigated over 10 million hectares of land and produced over 150 billion drippers for more than 2 million Farmers The Innovation is about applying water to the root and not to the soil thus enabling the plant to consume water and fertilizers at the right time at the right quantity in a very efficient manner without losing a lot to evaporation to a drainage Etc and this allows the plant to achieve much better yields much better quality and at the same time save a lot of water a lot of fertilizers and be much more efficient and How We Do agriculture with time we also made it much more efficient so able to be used with in different soils with different water qualities and in different crops and that that I think is a big part of the Innovation how do you take something as simple as that and bring it to the level of accuracy sophistication that that allows you to achieve consistent results so initially it was all about how do I grow in conditions where I couldn't grow before or how do I use as little water possible and these days it evolved to how do I manage my system in the most efficient manner possible how do I maximize my business objectives and also a lot how do I do it in a sustainable manner so sustainability is a big part of the overall things of how how we manage the irrigation system how we manage agriculture in general these days much of the Innovation also goes to the high-tech side of things so how do we measure the performance of the system how do we measure the performance of the plant and adjust the irrigation scheduling in the fertigation scheduling accordingly and and how do we create an automated system that farmers can control via their mobile phone or laptop or anything from a remote and how do we also give them the decision support systems so they make the most sophisticated smart decisions at the right time to achieve the maximum results possible in Israel netifim is a widely known name and has become synonymous to success from a business point of view netafim has managed to take a simple idea and turn it into a business that rolls in billions of shackles not only that but netafim has also managed to turn the Israeli desert which constitutes about half of the country's area into agricultural land from then onwards the way to go Global was short so I think you can talk about another female innovation without talking about Israeli Innovation so it all starts from the fact that we are in a company that started in Israel and is still Incorporated in Israel and Israel is an Innovation Hub we're a very small country with limited resources and we need to constantly innovate and come up with new ideas in different segments we're a company that started from in Israel we expanded to the world if we don't innovate constantly we don't have the right to survive and this is nurtured also by management which put it as one of our strategic pillars and also by the DNA of the people all the way to the field they all know that we need to constantly look for new things they all know that if they bring new ideas to the table these ideas will be looked at and considered very seriously we constantly move forward and this starts from the beginning I can give a few examples and for example when we started going into Brazil and working in the sugarcane industry we soon understood that some of our Solutions don't fit how they grow sugarcane and we started looking for how can we adjust they are solutions and our technology to their circumstances it took a few trials in a few years and there were some failures as well as some success and eventually we got to a system that's very very efficient and can increase sugar cane yields significantly reduced water usage and also fits the overall scheme of how they operate the farm being part of the Innovative ecosystem in Israel and a global leader in Precision Irrigation solutions for sustainable agriculture requires net FM to constantly seek out new Innovations one of the biggest challenges that we have today is digital farming and like any other industry agriculture as well must be supported by a technology these days and the whole Digital World in order to be able to achieve efficiencies in terms of input utilization labor etc etc and we are investing significantly in building a digital farming platform this is an experimental area where we try different growing techniques varieties and all kinds of trials that help us Implement some of the ideas that they come from the field yeah here you can see a very unique combination in the back we have the most sophisticated firm form of Agriculture a glass Greenhouse as is used in the Northern Hemisphere and here you have sugar cane a crop that's grown in many countries around the world a lot of it the most significant countries Brazil here we also do some experiments in terms of how to implement drip irrigation in sugarcane cultivation we are here actually trying to simulate all the farmers worldwide trying to simulate all the irrigation system supplying all the accessories all the interfaces modules for irrigation protegation and any sense of activities worldwide one big thing that all companies will have to adapt to is the fact that this is now a global world so and and companies need to truly become multinational and need to work in different environments different cultures in a seamless manner in order to thrive in this world [Music] it's a few weeks back I was a general and then it was 2004 or five I saw that people already shoot shoot rockets in Israel not 100 a day like today once in a while they shoot pockets and people start to get killed make me very uh annoyed ambitious that we cannot Israel start up Nation no solution against rocket into [Music] launched the Iron Dome program that would include the system's research and a demonstration of its intercepting capabilities at that time the development of such a system was estimated to take around 20 years in Israel the startup Nation all the powers we can we can tackle this both by the way in intelligence so I create a team and we analyzed about 24 or 5 34 ideas and we applied the industry around the world our people we get the idea we I Ruled them all out nothing with the book but I've been working and then we combine we create we're architecting the the concept by ourselves here and then I didn't want to do the regular r d process regular on this process you said okay this is the idea we have to have to develop many many Technologies it's not application in iPhone it's many many Technologies foreign explosive AI many proved that the work and then you try and build it one by one then you inject the big money and develop the system POC I said no we don't have time we do all in one pass it was huge risk so I was there to RND but we have to have authorization and money to do it industry after that we pick the industry so I went up directly up to the managers of Defense Forces Municipal defense in Israel and they said no no authorization so what I I do I'll get up to the room of the last now I said to my people okay we heard them all I was part of the system I said tomorrow we started I don't know how in 2007 two years after Brigadier General gold had started the research for the system Israel commissioned the development of the Iron Dome choosing Israeli contractor Raphael I set the timeline for three years three and a half three years this is the timelines for for finish the business it was also a breakthrough normally you stick 20 years we finish it one over 10 of the price and top performances we changed the roles of project management I enjoy a mobile all-weather air defense system was declared operational and first deployed in March 27 2011. 10 days later the system successfully intercepted a bm-21 grad launched from Gaza For the First Time by late October 2014 the Iron Dome system had intercepted over 1 200 Rockets the typical air defense missile battery consists of a radar unit missile control unit and several launchers all located at the same site can calculate where the enemy missile is going to fall so if it's going to fall into the sea we don't waste money it's okay if you want to the full open open desert we are not going to intercept automatically okay it's not the if it's going to fall in the city we intercept in parallel we give alert siren to the specific neighborhood where the missile going to fall so the letter said Tel Aviv they're going to fall in the I don't know east of Tel Aviv is getting the alarm around still working the rest of there you can go to work I don't it's part of a multi-tiered missile defense system developed to protect the country from threats ranging from mortars to icbms the system includes Arrow 2 Arrow 3 Iron beam The Rock 8 and David's sling most of these projects are led by the same original team the team of arundome is very special we pick 400 men and women of all of Israel the cream of the cream the number one from technology point of view and for personality point of view because they have to work freeze in the world with a lot of objection create invent innovate and work with each other and create a system those special teams still by the way the team is working till today in this space it's very special team so I think it's very unique but not only to iron of other projects or innovator in Defense Forces human organization in defense establishment they work together as a team to oppose the big cause big teams of know to create the ecosystem the Friendship to support each other to create together brainstorm together to which the to reach the target when once you go out of course it implicates all the ecosystem in Israel we went to Alaska Kodiak together with us take our own infrastructure all our industry all this present there we do everything in organization we hire this Russian huge aircraft and turn off we bring all the equipment of labs it's very nice Island small population very small population and and we took all the all the equipment we built Hotel no hotels the only one hotel very small we build hotels out of containers as the battlefield of the future relies on technology for the war to be won armies around the world trained their soldiers in operating Advanced systems in Israel there is a mandatory military service at the age of 18 and some of the soldiers are taking part in the development of some of those systems thus turning the IDF Israeli Defense Force into a major player in the Innovation ecosystem everybody almost everybody is going to the Army the Defense Forces they get a lot of responsibility when you are young and they take a lot of risk whoever in technology you have to invent technology create technology to be creative or either activate system that's very very complicated and you have freedom to make mistakes and correct to get to the goal it's a very good Training mechanism both from a psychology point of view a technical point of view when you are living in uncertain environment your creativity is much better the commercial world and the defense World leverage each other give each other it is very complicated to do but we have we have start to do it in Israel with successes we use of course defense company big companies but also we use the startup scene in Israel we use hundreds of startups that work with us on Dual use innovation things that are good for defense or security and physical going to the commercial world like swarm of drone that control the traffic in Tel Aviv with one of the transportation companies we can use the same infrastructure from swarm of drums so this cooperation scene in addition to International cooperation we cooperate with good partners in creating the technology U.

S is the famous part of course with missile defense organization but we have many more to create together the technology to share the resources share the Innovation so it's all about this open your mind to cooperation [Music] [Music] [Music] it was in March 2021 that the medical world was presented with a significant Discovery in the treatment of glioblastoma a highly evasive type of brain cancer exhibiting poor prognosis using a 3D printer this major Discovery came from Tel Aviv University in Israel and enables new and improved treatments for terminal glioblastoma we use the technology of 3D printing in order to create a tumor with its all microenvironment meaning with the blood vessels with the immune system everything around it that usually tumors recruit in order to be able to grow in size and diffuse we recreated that whole ecosystem in order to mimic better the tumor the way it is when it is inside the brain of patient by doing so we were able to find new targets for for new drugs or for existing drugs for repurposing them to a new Target like glioblastoma like this very aggressive tumor which has only three currently available drugs for it and the other side is to try different kind of drugs that are either for that humor or other cancer types and test and see which one is the best fit Professor ronit Sachi finara of the Sackler faculty of medicine lecturer at the soccer school Alliance and the director of the Morris Khan 3D bioprinting for cancer research initiative at Tel Aviv University was a lead researcher in a team that made discovery the novelty in our research is that we managed to create a 3D bioprinting tumor model by using two types of Bio inks one creates the blood vessels while the other creates the tumor tissue the technology that we have created here will allow us to have a rapid robust reproducible platform to develop new drugs to test existing drugs and to feed them to in a personalized manner to a specific patient combining the the understanding that we can use data science meaning all the big data that is available now freely on on the web you just click on the internet you you ask for a gene or you ask for a question like which genes are upregulated in glue blastoma and it gives you an answer of 10 000 patients we could have never had that before we would get 50 patients and that would be a lot from from One hospital and and that that is a game changer I think technology data machine learning AI all these tools that served the high-tech so well throughout the last decades these are extremely crucial tools for bringing more Health making Health more accessible creating a faster track for research the way we see it is that it will revolutionize the way we diagnose prevent and treat cancer the way to validate this platform will be to test it in an open label trial meaning that until now we always did clinical trials without knowing who the patient is so we cannot allow for follow-up the new clinical trial will be open label so we are getting a sample from the surgery room where creating our 100 mini tumors we're testing on them several drugs in two weeks we know which drug is the best as the world progresses more and more digitalizations that are going to medical records and then you can benefit from things that other countries have learned and apply it on your data think about this in one country one physician is going to notice that a drug has a completely different effect on their patient and maybe they found a drug that's going to affect Parkinson's that's been used for something completely else all of this information is going to immediately propagate to all of the world that's going to be connected but for this we need to make sure that all of our medical records are digitalized and shared globally so we can share this information so we can find new discoveries this time together 10. 5 trillion dollars are the global market for healthcare only 150 billion dollars are the global market it for cyber I. T so people who are looking to impact and people who are looking also to be entering a an industry that would assure that they can really develop their skills their their talent their impact along the years feel much more comfortable entering the healthcare ecosystem the covid-19 pandemic has had a profound worldwide impact as some scientific and clinical trials were temporarily put aside the world medical community cannot however ignore the great benefits of huge advancement in using RNA Therapeutics and peptide-based Therapeutics I've been researching nanoparticles for the last 20 years for cancer and for infectious diseases but the advancement that we got in the last year and a half was because there was this urgent medical need of a global pandemic at the moment being in this crisis we all collaborated in a fantastic manner it's something that we have not seen before we are all very happy to collaborate we saw that during this pandemic every little thing that we just published as a post on Twitter or on Facebook or or LinkedIn or whatever just went and then asking the email system is there anyone that has this antibody or this compound or another and immediately we got 10 answers in the same day this is something we have not seen before so for sure the the process of going through a major crisis build collaboration and bridges I see it as a trivial thing the the surprising effect will be if we see that we keep the memory of it and we continue working in that manner [Music] as the saying goes prophecy has been given to fools and in today's world even more so so even though we don't know what the future holds we do know that the technological Revolution train has left the station so where are we heading so I think we should look at a lot of the high-tech companies today as we look at the governments so this was a very nice idea shared by the late president Shimon Pierce he was saying that the new governments are going to be different they're going to be high-tech companies because they're Global and we're going to create a completely new way of creating politics I think Israel is already wants to afford to becoming not Israel the physical Nation it's Israel the digital Nation with all of the companies in ecosystem that has internally and the impact is different because of this it's creating a completely new way of being of creating industry I believe that Innovation and collaboration will also bring peace so the journey that you can imagine in Israel is really very unique it's a nation that started with Innovation and grew with Innovation it will continue to flourish and in many ways it becomes a model for many countries that they need to leave the old world where you rely on natural resources on the wealth of the land and you have to rely on your brain power when Nations become Innovation Nations they can grow side by side not on the account of others and so we are entering an era of collaboration and peace where we are together addressing Global threats such as covid-19 such as climate change such as cyber threats inequalities and all the other challenges that humanity is going to deal with it's bright I think today there is we see in a change in many many places putting Innovation first so if once you would look at a natural resources you would look at things that you can dig out of the ground today it's no more the case people are looking in all over the world for Innovation the industry here is expert oriented what does it mean it means that people think Global from day one it means that we're very receptive to foreign entities and to Global entities it also manifests itself in the industry we have more than 400 multinational companies who sit here shop be it an r d Center and in late years open Innovation outposts in the future Israel cannot stand alone the whole world stands on the brink of a technological Revolution that will fundamentally change the way we live work and relate to one another and it even has a name the fourth Industrial Revolution 4.

0 the one that is expected to be unlike anything the history of humankind has experienced before if we look specifically at the industrial sector then like many other sectors in the past two years the industrial players has faced use challenges from broken Global Supply chains to uh to safety of workers to really taking care of the resiliency of the business number one is the safety and well-being of the employees so safety 4. 0 that's everybody's talking about that everybody's is uh is dealing with that because this is a huge Challenge and important for every every facility right the second is supply chain the third thing is resiliency the fourth topic is you know the uh the classic industry 4.