Canada can learn from Israel's innovation

This op-ed was published by Canadian Jewish News on June 26, 2014. Read it on page 11 of CJN online.

What do Israel and Waterloo Region in southwestern Ontario have in common? Those of us who are familiar with this pocket of Canada – home to the country’s most innovative university and the birthplace of the smartphone – will tell you it’s a shared vision for excellent entrepreneurial ecosystems.

I reflected on this confluence of entrepreneurial values with His Excellency Rafaêl Barak, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, when he visited our campus this month. Israel catapulted itself onto the global innovation stage more than two decades ago and has skilfully created the conditions to sustain the Silicon Wadi – and earned acclaim for the chutzpah to do it in the first place. But the story in our corner of Ontario is too frequently characterized by the meteoric rise and subsequent headwinds faced by the smartphone-maker, BlackBerry.

The story of Waterloo’s rise as an international hub for innovation neither begins nor ends with BlackBerry’s successes and challenges. Many people don’t know that our University is the beating heart of one of the world’s Top 20 startup ecosystems according to Startup Genome. Yet as Waterloo Region continues to establish itself on the world stage as an entrepreneurial powerhouse, most of the rest of Canada lags behind.

In fact, the Conference Board of Canada recently awarded our country a D in innovation. This grade is in stark contrast to the growing global sentiment that Israel truly is the “Startup Nation.”

So, I find myself asking what Canada can learn from Israel’s growth as a global innovation leader, and from Waterloo’s success in establishing a flourishing innovation ecosystem, to fuel growth in other parts of our nation.

Of course, Israel grew its capacity for innovation and entrepreneurialism to deal with the problems posed by its dearth of natural resources. It created an entirely new exportable commodity in its entrepreneurs. Canada has the opportunity to do the same thing if it capitalizes on the talent growing in Waterloo region.

After all, we have the human capital. Ambassador Barak noted that Waterloo’s model of co-op education, where our students move between academic and paid work terms with our 5,200 employers worldwide, is equipping young people with real-world experience while maturing as professionals and thinkers.

But Canada also needs to look at some of the other lessons from Israel’s explosion as an innovation powerhouse. The venture capital scene for technological innovation in Canada is relatively immature. Many startups — including some of the many student startups founded at the University of Waterloo’s incubator, Velocity — migrate to Silicon Valley to get the VC they need to bring their ideas to maturity and scale. This needs to change and we need to look at the experience of the Silicon Wadi to understand how.

Canada has also managed to keep investment in civilian research and development stubbornly low — less than half that of Israel on a per capita basis from 2000 to 2005, according to the United Nations Development Program.

Canada’s economy will never grow as fast or as smart as we want it to if we don’t learn from Israel’s successes and see that research is absolutely central to prosperity in the knowledge economy. Marginal policy tinkering with tax credits will not get this done. It’s going to take bolder approaches, and Israel is an excellent starting point for best practices.

Across these and other economic and workforce opportunities, universities have a vital role to play.

I recently led a large delegation of University of Waterloo researchers and administrators to Haifa, Israel. We were there to implement an exciting research partnership agreement with our Israeli sister university, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

The Technion was founded by a truly remarkable cohort of Jewish scholars and statesmen, including Albert Einstein, who believed that to survive and thrive following its founding in 1948 Israel needed to establish a strong technological advantage. Since then, Technion has become one of the world’s great innovation universities.

Our new research partnership centres on quantum information science, nanotechnology, and water. These three disciplines will shape the future of industries and communities, as the world becomes hotter, flatter, more crowded and, crucially, more connected. Our work together bears enormous potential, from cybersecurity to microscopic medical devices to advanced hydrology.

I believe that the Waterloo-Technion partnership is more than a joint academic venture — it’s also a symbol of how Canada and Israel can continue to learn from one another and identify values we share at a fundamental level.

We are working together to grow the bilateral relationship in a way that moves beyond divisive politics, expanding into deeply human and hopeful experiments in research, partnership, and the building of whole new industries that will ignite economies in Waterloo, in Canada, in Israel and across the world.