We Did It

Eight weeks ago we arrived in Haifa, Israel with the goal of building businesses out of Technion-developed technology.  We've met with business leaders, incubator directors, venture capitalists and industry experts; we've pitched our ventures every week and received tough but important feedback; and we've had access to industry advisors and mentors whose experiences in entrepreneurship have helped us navigate the intricacies of our own industries.

Last night was the culmination of this process, as we pitched our ventures to venture capitalists from top firms such as Bessemer, Sequoia and Giza.  Simply the opportunity to pitch business plans to top VC's is great, but after eight weeks of immersing ourselves in our ventures it was nothing short of impressive.  All six of our international venture teams presented eloquently, expressing the problems our businesses solve, the markets they address and the the amount of funding required to make them profitable.  We fielded tough questions from the panel of VC's, but after two months of habituation we were perfectly accustomed to the Israeli style of questioning.

Looking back on what we've accomplished, I am very impressed by our collective progress.  Eight weeks ago we were presented with technologies in fields ranging from medical diagnostics to imaging and chemical analysis.  We've taken these scientific innovations and built real business ventures out of them.  The experience of building a business is truly priceless, and not something that many people can say they have done.  From solving the problems we've encountered along the way to understanding the motivations and thought processes of venture capitalists who fund our ventures, we now posses the tools and experiences of seasoned entrepreneurs.

The Dingman-Technion Entrepreneurship
teams after our final pitches

Biotechnology and Food Engineering

As a part of our work at the Technion we from time to time have the opportunity to visit some of the cutting edge laboratories here to meet with Technion faculty and researchers.  Today, we visited the brand new facilities of the Biotechnology and Food Engineering Faculty housed in the Carol B. Epstein Building at the Technion.  There, we met with two brilliant professors, Esther Meyron Holtz and Uri Lesmes, who gave us an overview of their research.

Dr. Holtz prefaced her presentation to us by disclaiming the fact that she is first and foremost a researcher and that her work is therefore intended to further academic understanding and not to produce commercially viable products. With a room full of MBA students currently engaged in technology transfer, this provided us an opportunity to listen to her research through the lens of tech transfer professionals and provide feedback on potential commercial applications for the breakthroughs coming from her laboratory.

Focusing primarily on the role of iron in the body, Dr. Holtz's work has produced considerable insights into the understanding of free radicals in the body and the resulting oxidative stress that causes the human body to age.  With continued research on this topic, it is possible that her work could result in treatments for Chrohn's Disease, osteoperosis, cancer, neurodegeneration, insulin resistance and coronary heart disease.  As MBA students, we expressed to Dr. Holtz the enormous market potential of her work and encouraged her to seek intellectual property protection around which people like us could one day build businesses.

Then we heard from Dr. Uri Lesmes whose work involves the development of new techniques to produce healthier foods on an industrial scale.  With obesity reaching pandemic proportions there is a dire need to develop health foods that are not only appealing to the consumer but also affordable and commercially viable.  Much of Dr. Lesmes' work involves investigation into emulsion digestion whereby altering the chemistry of specific foods greatly affects the lipid digestion in humans.  The goal of such research is to develop emulsified foods that taste the same but result in less caloric absorption by the body.  In other word, Dr. Lesmes, asked, "Who wouldn't want to eat an ice cream that tastes the same but has half the calories?" We immediately understood that the social value and commercial value of such a breakthrough would be enormous, not to mention delicious.

At the Biotechnology and Food Engineering Faculty

North Company Visits

This past weekend the team completed our Tour of Israel with a trip to the northern regions of Galilee and Golan Heights.  While there, we had the opportunity to meet executives at two of Israel's more exciting companies: Amiad and the Misgav Venture Accelerator.

Amiad

With the world's population rapidly expanding in areas already challenged by substandard access to clean water, it has become clear that the problem that my generation will be charged with solving is how to provide water to a world population that will exceed 7 billion by the end of this decade.  In a country where water is an issue of national security, it is no surprise that one of the world's most innovative water filtration companies has come out of Israel.  By providing customized solutions that last a lifetime, Amiad deploys its filtration products across the globe to meet the needs of small African villages and growing metropolises alike.  In meeting with their management and touring their facilities, our team left Amiad quite impressed by their innovative approach to tackling this timeless problem.

Misgav Venture Accelerator

An incubator run the by Trendlines Group, the Misgav Venture Accelerator is focused on building businesses out of life science technologies that seek to improve the human condition.  Awarded "Best Incubator" by Israel's Office of the Chief Scientist, Misgav is clearly doing something right.  Their CEO and Chairman Steve Rhodes walked the team through the Israeli incubator program and discussed its merits and recent successes.  By providing mentoring, office support and collaboration among like-minded entrepreneurs, Misgav has shown great promise in creating such  innovative companies as ETView and Endo Grab.  Their innovations save on healthcare costs and improve healthcare delivery in such a manner that the end user and the healthcare provider both benefit.  Before concluding our meeting, we all had the opportunity to pitch the companies we are building at the Technion and receive valuable feedback from experienced venture executive and long time business builder Steve Rhodes, an honor of which many an entrepreneur would be jealous.

Halfway Point

We’re now officially more than one month into the Israeli experience, and what a time it has been.  We’ve met the President, slept in Bedouin tents and hobnobbed at high tech and biomedical conferences.  Given this incredible diversity of opportunities, this blog has been largely dedicated to these amazing experiences.  Amid all of this, we’ve engrossed ourselves in six different technology commercialization projects.  What started as patented technologies have evolved into very strong business models.  We still have a long ways to go, but the feedback from venture capitalists, experts in the field, and of course Asher Epstein and Ze’ev Ganor, will no doubt help us get there.

On our first full day in Israel, we met the inventors of our technologies and our Israeli teammates.  In one short week we scrambled to meet with everyone we could, from the inventor and his or her colleagues to anyone with relevant experience in the field, in order to better understand our technologies and how to apply them in the marketplace.  From there, we’ve narrowed down our list of commercial applications from five to one and honed in on real market size estimates.  From our presentation skills to our business plans, every single individual has made marked and noticeable improvements over the last month.  The venture capitalists continue to poke holes in our arguments, assumptions and models, and we take this feedback into account every week.

While we are still a long ways from launching a business, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labor.  Our first presentations demonstrated how little we knew about our technologies, the industry in which we planed to commercialize them and the details of the intellectual property that protects them.  Since then, we have all become experts on our patents, performed extensive industry analyses, and become quite accustomed to the tough line of questioning that we receive during and after our presentations.  Our presentation slides are polished and professional and where it once took five minutes to explain our technology, we now have the pitch down to 30 seconds.

From financial projections to the final business plan, there is much work yet to be done prior to our final venture capitalist pitches on July 7^th.  With the training and mentoring we are receiving, I am confident we will get there.

The Daily Grind

We've been in Israel for about a month now, and one question that we consistently receive from readers of this blog, friends and family, and Israelis alike is: what exactly are you doing in Israel? The nature of our project was broadly defined in our first blog post, and I have done my best to update on the most salient and exciting trips, meetings and events. And while our busy schedule has meant that no two days in Israel are created equal, I will attempt to express how we spend our time between travel and meeting important dignitaries.

Asher meeting with the group

After a weekend generally packed with travels, meetings and a little down time on the beach if we're lucky, Monday morning the whole team heads to the Bronica Innovation Lab at the Technion. Located on the sixth floor of the Industrial Engineering and Management Building, we work on our technology commercialization strategies while sitting around a large conference-style table. Between market size research, building presentation decks and meetings with Dingman Center Managing Director Asher Epstein, our office time keeps us quite busy.

While we're at the Technion we also take the opportunity to visit the laboratories where the cutting edge research that we are attempting to commercialize originated. Here, we have the opportunity to not only tour the facilities of the Technion but also meet with the innovators behind the technologies in order to understand the scientific and commercial sides of their work.

Touring the Technion Visitor's Center

When we need a break from the rigor of our work and meetings, the team walks outside our office to enjoy the view from the roof of the Bloomfield Building. From our vantage point atop a hill, we can see all of downtown Haifa, the Old City and even a little bit of the beach. Enough to recharge our batteries and get back to work, anyways.

Shimon Peres...in Person

Today we had the amazing opportunity to visit with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. We joined the American Technion Society at the beautiful David Citadel Hotel in a small group session with President Peres and Technion President Peretz Lavie who started the morning by discussing the history of the Technion. The institution, which is about to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of its cornerstone laying, has been the backbone of Israel's high-tech industry, training its engineers and producing groundbreaking research for years.

President Shimon Peres with Peretz Lavie

President Peres, whose support of the Technion over the years helped Israel become the high-tech powerhouse that is is today, predicted the need for Israel to now move into neuroscience and neurotechnology with the same vigor that it entered the nanotechnology industry. Specifically, President Peres emphasized the importance of building better computer-brain interface technology to help researchers understand more precisely how the human mind works. With this technology, he suggested,  researchers could develop stronger therapeutic methods and devices to better cure neurological ailments such as Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's.

The session ended with an open question and answer session for President Peres, who fielded questions on topics such as how Israel will incorporate the innovations of companies like Better Place into its infrastructure in the coming years.  The mere fact that President Peres dedicated his time to our group indicated the importance of the high tech industry in Israel, but in spending 90 minutes of his morning in open and frank discussion with us was truly unprecedented. When a statesman of his caliber is willing to dedicate his day to such a cause, its shows the esteem in which the Technion and its innovations are held and how treasured they are by the Israeli government and the individuals who run it.

Communicating Israeli Style

One thing that became apparent to the participants in this program last year was the stark contrast between Israeli and American communication styles.  Add to that dichotomy the diversity of our team this year: one Taiwanese, two mainland Chinese, one Brazilian and one Nigerian by way of the United Kingdom.  And not to mention that not all Israelis are made equal either, as the nation’s open immigration policies have brought in diversity from across the globe.  The resulting makeup of every technology commercialization team is diverse.

While multinational companies have found that this type of diversity often leads to great results, it is not without its difficulties.  As a result, we all took part in a course on cross cultural communications focusing on the differences between American and Israeli styles.  We discussed how each culture views itself and how it views the other and enjoyed looking at some of the following differences.  For instance, where Americans see themselves as friendly and open, Israelis see this as naivety; and where Israelis see themselves as confident and willing to take risks, Americans consider this brash and arrogant.  In short, members of a particular group tend to see their defining characteristics as positives that others sometimes view as negatives.

While dissecting these cultural differences was a fun and sometimes comical experience, the recognition and corresponding application of them in our work this summer is serious.  My team is comprised of four individuals all born in different countries across several continents (US, China, Ukraine, Israel), so understanding the quirks of our counterparts is crucial to our success.  Disagreements will no doubt arise, but understanding our cultural differences can help us limit the disagreement to business decisions and defuse and difficulties stemming from our respective backgrounds.

When we leave Israel in July, our technologies will remain here in Haifa, and the inventors will remain in their labs at the Technion.  One skill that we will all take back with us, however, is the real world expertise of navigating an international business team.  Indeed, many of us signed up for this experience because we relish the thought of connecting and working with people from across the world – the international nature of our team bears this out.  One of the challenges of today’s business environment is the ability to effectively navigate cross cultural situations, and I know we are all better prepared for this challenge moving forward.

Getting Down to Work

Between biomed conferences, Israeli holidays involving barbecuing on the beach and a little sightseeing, we have spent countless hours working on our technologies.  On our first full day in Israel everyone met their Israeli counterparts and saw presentations from the Technion innovator who developed their techs.  From that moment on, we have been fully immersed in every aspect of our technologies: wrapping our minds around the science behind them, researching the potential applications for them, meeting with experts in the field and related fields in which they could be commercialized and of course conceiving of the initial business models for their potential commercialization.

With just one week to immerse ourselves in our technologies, each team presented five potential applications to the class and our instructors.  We were encouraged to move beyond the most obvious applications for our technologies, which means we saw some really outside-the-box ideas for commercial applications for these innovations.

While our instructors, Ze’ev Ganor and Asher Epstein, went easy on us in our first class, they turned on the Israeli charm for our second Thursday night meeting.  The first presentation was interrupted during their first few slides for questions – a sharp contrast from the MBA classes back home where professors patiently await the obligatory “Questions?” slide to tell you how wrong your assumptions are.

Olivia and Lisa presenting their technology

To that end, we have learned a lot during our first full week.  First, you must think outside the box when it comes to entrepreneurship – thinking linearly about applications for a new technology is an easy way to get shot down by a venture capitalist.  Second, understanding the market for a new technological application is not as straightforward as it might at first appear.  Numerous assumptions must often be made (especially when dealing with an innovation that solves a problem in a unique manner), and those assumptions must be supported by logical claims.  Failure to do so is an easy way to ensure tough questions from venture capitalists.  And third, selling a new technology is all about solving a problem.  Convincing your audience of the severity of this problem and how your innovation addresses it better than the competition is the basis of your sales pitch, and you should never lose sight of it.

Our First Few Days

A Guest Post from Femi Oluboyede:

After about 24hrs of travelling depending on the country the trip began, all 12 participants of the Global Technology Entrepreneurship Fellowship 2011, at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Jennifer Birch, our trip coordinator, met most of us at the airport and we eventually began the trip from Tel Aviv to Haifa where we would all be staying for the next 8 weeks of the program.

First impressions of Israel: lots of greenery, lots of high-rise buildings and easily recognized brand name companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Nissan, McDonald’s etc. The highways are quite similar to those in the US and rush hour traffic is a universal unifier. Some of us expected to see a lot of security and a strong military presence at the airport, but other than one security officer asking to see all our passports as we awaited the arrival of two classmates on a delayed flight, this airport could be just like any other around the world.

The house we’re staying in is down a series of steps off Anzo Serini street in Haifa. The women’s part of the house has several bedrooms on two floors, living space and adjacent to the men’s house which has five bedrooms on two floors, a dining and living room space and a really lovely garden area with flowers with a view of Haifa and the Mediterranean sea.

Our first meal was salad and pizza as we gathered together in our new living space to meet one another (except for one of us, finishing off his on-line final exam from Tel Aviv) for the first time. A quick walk around the area after the meal revealed that we were in a fairly quiet residential area. Tomorrow, we would explore the path to the beach after recovering from our trip. We headed home and slowly crept to bed to get some much needed rest and battle the jet-lag setting in.

A Realization

A Guest Post from Shawn Latimer:

I woke up this morning to instant coffee, offset by a beautiful view of the Mediterranean off of our shared porch, and began to contemplate the task in front of us.  The first of 8 classes was last night, and the rigor and detail we need to put into our final deliverables is daunting.  These are real applications, with real opportunity to create real businesses.

And we will be part of the team that makes it happen.

Some of the technologies have potential to save lives, providing better tools across the medical industry.  But the only way to get them into the hands of the people that can use them is to produce an actual product, and then get it in front of people.  This is the best kind of synergy between inventor and business.  Sure, we would all love to make a blockbuster product that makes heaps of money.  The real value though, is in getting these techniques to market so they can save lives.

We have 8 weeks to scope out an entire business model, from initial ideas for how to use the patent all the way through to the budget and final business plan.  It’s an ambitious goal, but with the help of our Israeli classmates, and this view, I think we can make it work.

Israel – Startup Nation

Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s Startup Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle is required reading for anyone looking to do business in Israel.  In it, the co-authors describe how Israel has undergone a transformation from fledgling nation to the world’s most exciting place for technological innovation and entrepreneurship.  The reasons are varied, but all have their roots in a shared sense of survival around which this small nation has cultivated the ideal environment in which to start a business.  If you don’t believe me, just consider that Israel has:

• the highest density of startup companies in the world (one for every 1,844 Israelis)
• more companies listed on NASDAQ than all of Europe
• the greatest portion of GDP spent on civilian R&D worldwide

From the perspective of an MBA student and entrepreneur, Israel offers everything you could ever dream of.  I’m told that driving down Highway 2 from Haifa to Israel I will see offices for global leaders like Intel, HP, Google and Microsoft.  Not to mention that I will have access to Israeli startups-turned-corporations such as Teva, Given Imaging and Netafim.  And nevermind the brilliant researchers at the Technion and the venture capitalists to whom I will pitch my ideas on a weekly basis.

The concentration of multinational firms, innovative startups and funded research in an environment that encourages learning by doing and innovative approaches to problem solving makes Israel the ideal place for an internship and beyond.

Shalom and Welcome!

This summer a group of 12 MBA students will spend eight weeks in Haifa, Israel as part of the Dingman Center’s Global Technology Entrepreneurship Fellowship.  There, we will develop commercialization plans for exciting high-tech intellectual property at the Technion in Haifa.  With this blog we hope to communicate what promises to be the experience of a lifetime through our photographs, videos, and collective voice.

What exactly will we be doing in Israel?  At the Technion, often referred to as Israel’s MIT, we will work in teams with our Israeli counterparts to develop commercialization plans for some of the world’s most cutting-edge IP.  We will study Israeli technology and industry dynamics through company visits and meetings with the leaders in agro-technology, water-technology and medical devices.  We will attend conferences in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to immerse ourselves in the latest trends and network with executives in the technology sector.  And we will gain invaluable insight and feedback by pitching our plans weekly to Israeli venture capitalists.

In our free time we’ll explore all that Israel has to offer.  We’ll swim (or float on?) the Dead Sea, tour the ancient city of Jerusalem, enjoy bustling Tel Aviv, and hike in stunning scenery in Israel’s North.  We’ll seek out the finest shawarma and falafel Israel has to offer.  And we might even spend a few hours on the beach.

We'll do all of this as a team; we'll learn from one another, sharing cultures, languages and perspectives towards the goal of collective learning.

Throughout the summer this blog will relate the story of our time in Israel.  We hope you enjoy it.