Ninja Future by Gary Shapiro

Author:Gary Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062890535
Publisher: HarperCollins

Israel

If you define innovation by number of patents per person, Israel is one of the most innovative countries in the world.

What’s their secret? Israelis have ninja innovation in their DNA. When you’re living under the constant threat of conflict, a business risk is not nearly as intimidating. And this environment has produced a remarkable determination within the people of Israel to succeed—and indeed thrive.

In many ways, the ninja spirit in Israel and the United States are alike. Both countries have been built on a high percentage of immigrants, a culture of risk-taking and asking “why?,” a focus on education, and free-market systems. Nearly half of Israelis hold tertiary degrees, making Israel the third-most-educated country in the world, behind only Canada and Japan.14

Israelis take their national existence and security seriously. They have a mandatory military service for most of the population. With that shared common experience and sense of mission, they believe and invest heavily in the defense industry. And the defense industry, of course, is huge in Israel, with spillover effects across other sectors.

For example, Tel Aviv–based startup Beyond Verbal developed an app that can recognize emotion in a voice. This and other technologies could be used to identify deception in our airports and at our borders. Other Israeli startups develop products with multiple use cases, too. Lishtot, headquartered in Jerusalem, has developed a product that detects contamination such as E. coli and lead in drinking water. And Qlone, created by Yokne’am Illit–based EyeCue Vision Technologies, is an app that lets you scan any object using your smartphone to create a 3-D model that you can then modify. These three startups were among Israel’s four dozen exhibitors at CES 2018.

And Israeli tech innovation is spilling over into the United States. As of 2018, more than 350 startups with Israeli founders had opened offices in New York, including big names such as coworking space WeWork and ride-sharing app Vial.15 So many bright ideas are coming out of Israel that startups are looking west for funding.

Much credit for Israel’s entrepreneurial success can be attributed to former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres. During his incredible fifty-five-year political career, he served three terms as prime minister, with stints as foreign minister, finance minister, and deputy defense minister. And he served as Israel’s president from 2007 to 2014.

Peres spent much of his life advocating for peace. In fact, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel’s then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for his contributions to the Oslo Accords. He founded the Peres Center for Peace, which helped the cause of peace by encouraging Jews and Arabs to share ideas and funded health-care services to Palestinians.

I had the honor of meeting Peres twice. In 2014, thanks to Israeli high-tech entrepreneur and conference legend Joseph “Yossi” Vardi, I joined several technology executives in discussing why Israelis and Americans lead the world in innovation. While Vardi joked about Jewish mothers being the driving force of many successful innovators, I

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