A certain mystique surrounds the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The university has helped make Israel the “Start-Up Nation” celebrated in books and venture-capital circles, has spun off dozens of companies, and has taught entrepreneurship since long before it became popular.
Its worldwide prestige is why Cornell University chose the Technion four years ago as its partner to build a new technology-focused campus in New York City.
Yet for all its vaunted reputation, there’s actually little in the Technion policies or formal practices that’s all that different from the approach at dozens of other successful institutions around the world. On paper, at least, it doesn’t stand out.
Instead, it’s a certain hard-to-pinpoint ethos in the institute, located on a hilly campus in this city on the Mediterranean Sea, that sets the Technion apart.
Ziv Lautman, a recent graduate and co-founder of a two-year-old company called BreezoMeter, calls it “an atmosphere of excellence.”
It’s a place where many faculty members work comfortably and eagerly with industry on research partnerships, and students aspire to make similar connections or even to forge their own paths. “We’re attractive to students who think they know what company they’re going to start,” says Ehud Behar, a professor of physics.
It’s that ethos that Cornell officials are working to channel for the new Cornell Tech applied-sciences campus 5,600 miles away. The new institution now operates out of the Google building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and will eventually be housed in a futuristic complex on Roosevelt Island, in the East River, construction for which started in June. The institution offers graduate-level studies focused on the media, health technology, and the built environment.
Cornell Tech aims to be a different kind of higher-education institution, infused with some of the Technion’s DNA, even as officials here in Israel and in New York acknowledge that a lot of the Technion’s culture — what Mr. Lautman calls its “spirit” — is intimately tied to its role in Israel’s early Zionist past and in its current high-tech boom. The challenge, says Daniel Huttenlocher, founding dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech, is “how can we abstract it and bring it to New York City.”
‘Spin-Out People’
Peretz Lavie, the Technion’s president and himself a founder of several companies for treating sleep disorders, boasts often about the institute’s part in turning Israel from a “Jaffa orange” economy into a high-tech powerhouse. The influx of engineers and computer scientists from the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1990s, and the expertise of veterans from the Israel Defense Forces’ famed “8200 Unit” and other special military-technology units were also major factors.
But Technion statistics bear him out: more than 1,600 companies founded or managed by Technion graduates over the past 20 years, with more than half of them still active; nearly 60 percent of the Israeli companies traded on the Nasdaq founded or co-founded by Technion alumni; and a reported rate of return in technology-transfer revenue per research dollar that outpaced all but two major American research universities in 2012.
Yet, as Mr. Lavie notes, “tech transfer by itself is a small portion of what we are doing.” As do a growing number of other universities, the Technion aims to measure its entrepreneurial accomplishments not just by how it commercializes its research inventions but against a broader mission: the impact its graduates can have on the economy, the nation, and mankind. Or, as a Technion professor now running a joint Cornell-Technion venture in New York has put it, the focus is less on creating spin-out companies and more on developing “spin-out people.”
Founded in the early 1900s as an institute for training early settlers and kibbutzniks in technical and agricultural arts, the Technion has always considered basic and applied research as two sides of the same coin. The institute began teaching in 1925, decades before Israeli statehood. While it is strongly associated with Israel’s European-led pioneer history, Mr. Lavie says, it’s trying to better reflect the diversity of today’s Israeli society. After a concerted effort to improve its social diversity, about 20 percent of its students are Israeli Arabs.
That connection between the academic and the “real world” remains a hallmark today. Mr. Behar, the physicist, for example, is working to develop new approaches to satellite technology, launching a cluster of smaller satellites that communicate with one another while flying in formation. In collaboration with Israeli space companies and Israel Aerospace Industries, a team of some 40 professors and students from disciplines across the university are developing the Space Autonomous Mission for Swarming and Geolocation, a $10-million-plus cluster of “nano-satellites” slated for a launch by early 2017.
Mr. Behar says that it’s important for students to have hands-on experience to prepare them for their careers and that the project will help the Technion become an academic center on small satellites.
The project also makes sense in Israel’s geopolitical context, notes Mr. Lavie, the institute’s president, since several of the country’s close neighbors are hostile to it. “We cannot send satellites east,” where they could use the earth’s rotational pull as an accelerator, says Mr. Lavie. So the advance of technology using smaller satellites that require less power could prove advantageous to the country in the long run.
Down-to-earth policies can make a difference, too. The government’s funding system for Israeli universities penalizes institutions if students take longer than four years to graduate. So the Technion adopted a policy that attempts to keep students from working at outside jobs more than 20 hours a week, to keep them focused on their studies. But with so many good job opportunities at Intel, Google, and dozens of other high-tech companies located nearby, at the Matam industrial park, students often work much more than that. And the Technion looks the other way.
“If we were very stringent about it, I think it would be counterproductive,” says Mr. Lavie.
Despite a somewhat lax attitude toward the work rule, the Technion has a reputation for academic rigor. “Studies are super, super hard,” says Mr. Lautman, the co-founder of BreezoMeter and a 2012 graduate. “You can’t do it by yourself.” As a consequence, most students get through by forming study groups — which happens to be exactly the kind of collaborative educational process Cornell Tech is formally promoting for its master’s students.
Mr. Lautman says the courses were also often inspiring. “All your professors are big shots,” he says, with companies, patents, and even “exits” to their names. That the students see professors’ “exits” as signs of professorial success — the term is business jargon for when an early-stage company is sold or goes public and its investors recover their money — speaks volumes.
But sprinkled in with the grind are frequent opportunities for recognition, often in the form of contests and competitions. The university, for instance, sponsors a national competition for start-up companies called BizTec, with a nine-month program of mentoring and milestones for students from across Israel. BreezoMeter, with two other Technion alumni as co-founders, won in 2013.
“It was the University of How to Build Your Company,” says Mr. Lautman. BreezoMeter uses software to collect and analyze publicly available air-quality data from a variety of sources to provide localized reports — what Waze is for traffic, it aims to be for air pollution. It employs 11 people, has raised $1.8 million in venture funds, and has presented its technology to officials at the United Nations and the White House.
Improvising More
Despite its reputation as an entrepreneurial and tech-transfer powerhouse, the Technion sees itself as lagging in several areas.
To encourage professors to form companies, it has an unusually generous policy on revenue sharing: Professors are entitled to 50 percent of revenue earned from inventions they develop in the course of their university research. Most universities give inventors one-third.
Last year the Technion’s technology-transfer revenues were $30 million, but as is the case for many institutions, most of the revenue came from one big product. For the Technion, that’s a drug called Azilect, for treating Parkinson’s disease. But that revenue is based on intellectual-property protection that expires in 2017, so the university is coming up on a steep patent cliff.
The institute is also rethinking some of the programs it uses to identify early-stage ideas with commercial potential and to nurture them. “We’ve missed out on too many opportunities,” says Wayne Kaplan, executive vice president for research.
Where does all this leave Cornell Tech?
Back in New York City, officials say they aim to replicate the spirit of teamwork and rigor. Adam Shwartz, a Technion professor of electrical engineering since 1994, now leads the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York. The Jacobs institute, which Mr. Shwartz calls Cornell Tech’s “sandbox” for testing out experimental approaches to teaching and research, and for putting that research into practice through companies and other ventures, is a nonprofit organization run jointly by Cornell and the Technion. Professors from each institution teach there.
Mr. Shwartz says he wants to see the Technion’s ethos of “improvising more and following the rules less” adopted in New York. For example, Cornell Tech’s one-year postdoctoral program, called Runway, is focused solely on helping students turn their research ideas into start-ups. It features an unusual intellectual-property model that gives the inventors complete say in how their inventions are commercialized.
For now, it’s unclear how this mix of Ivy League academics and Israeli entrepreneurship will work. As Mr. Shwartz notes, not even Technion officials are quite sure how to transfer something as ephemeral as a culture.
“It’s obvious that we do bring something,” he says, “but it’s not very clear what.”
Corrections (7/29/2015, 2:20 p.m.): The director of the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is Adam Shwartz, not Schwartz. The Chronicle regrets the error. In addition, the original description of Technion’s satellite project mischaracterized several details. In particular, while the defense contractor Rafael is involved with the project, the main such collaborator is Israel Aerospace Industries. The article has been updated to reflect these changes.
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
