A century after a New York banker donated $100,000 to help establish what would become the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, his hometown is reaping the benefits of his generosity.
Last month the Technion, Israel’s oldest university, and Cornell University won a closely watched competition to build an applied-sciences campus in New York City, with a goal of spurring technology-driven economic growth in the city. As part of its winning bid, Cornell and the Technion plan to construct a $2-billion campus on Roosevelt Island, using land donated by the city. The facility, known as NYCTech, is due to open in 2017.
The Technion is very much a junior partner in the project. Cornell will shoulder the vast majority of the costs (as an Israeli public university, the Technion is prohibited from spending government money on projects overseas), and Technion faculty members are expected to spend only short amounts of time teaching at the new facility.
But tapping into Technion expertise in turning the city of Haifa, where it is based, into the engine of Israel’s rapidly expanding high-tech economy is crucial to New York City’s dream of fostering the next Silicon Valley.
“Technion graduates changed the economy of Israel,” says its president, Peretz Lavie. As evidence of the institution’s impact, he says, of the 121 Israeli companies listed on Nasdaq, more than half were founded or are run by Technion graduates. “Over one generation, we moved from an economy based on Jaffa oranges to an economy based on semiconductors.”
The Technion began as the dream of pre-Israel Zionist leaders who wanted to establish a European-style technical college in what was then Palestine. With money from the wealthy New Yorker, Jacob Schiff, and a Russian tea merchant, the cornerstone was laid in 1912, but classes were delayed by World War I. The college finally opened for classes in 1924 and in nearly 90 years has developed an international reputation for engineering, computer science, mathematics, and chemistry.
For NYCTech, the Israeli university will focus primarily on developing the Technion-Cornell Institute of Innovation, the heart of the new campus that will be organized around three interdisciplinary hubs: connective media, healthier life, and the built environment.
As part of the institute, Technion and Cornell will design a master’s of applied sciences degree to foster study across disciplines.
“The idea is to take graduates of engineering and science degrees in the United States and put them into a program that will give them some core advanced courses in information and communications technology—these are the technologies that are relevant to all the industries that we are going to focus on.” says Paul D. Feigin, a professor of statistics and senior executive vice president at the Technion.
The applied-sciences program will work closely with local industries, he says, based in part on the way the Technion has built tight relationships with corporations in Haifa. Students at the Technion, for example, often work part time during the final year of their studies.
“That way, the companies get their first peek at the talent that’s produced in the Technion, and that’s the sort of model we wanted to transfer to New York City,” Mr. Feigin says.
An Entrepreneurial Focus
The approach is also attractive to students.
“The students tend to know what is going on in industry and tend to go through their education in such a way that they will be able to affect the way the industry operates here [in Haifa]. That translates into entrepreneurship, into start-ups, into laboratories,” says Oded Shmueli, Technion executive vice president for research.
“I have a student who is currently finishing his Ph.D., but he has already been working for a whole year in industry,” he says. “Even before he finished his Ph.D., he had a fair number of offers to join very attractive companies.”
The unusual ecosystem has attracted a slew of top multinational corporations to set up branches around the Technion campus so they can entice the brightest students into their labs. The first major arrival was IBM, which set up a research-and-development facility on the Technion campus 40 years ago. Others now eagerly snapping up Technion students nearby include GE, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Philips, and Yahoo. In addition, major Israeli technology leaders like Elbit, a manufacturer of advanced electronic-defense systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries emerged from the Technion engineering department. They have been followed in the last 20 years by dozens of high-tech start-ups and the development of new products. The institution’s tech-transfer office files an average of 300 patents a year.
The commitment to entrepreneurship is embraced at the very top. Mr. Lavie, the institution’s president, is himself a serial entrepreneur. He set up sleep laboratories at Harvard Medical Center and four Israeli hospitals, and created a medical company to develop his patented equipment for the home diagnosis of sleep disorders.
Instructors also push the entrepreneurial agenda. Twenty-five years ago, Dan Shechtman, a materials-science professor, started a course in technological entrepreneurship that more than 10,000 students have now attended.
“It’s designed to encourage our graduates to open start-ups sometime in the future,” says Mr. Shechtman, who last year won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “I wanted to implant the bug of entrepreneurship in their minds. I do it by bringing in invited speakers, people who made it in the industry.”
A Silicon Valley for New York
Saul Singer, co-author of Start-Up Nation, a book that chronicles the rise of Israeli’s technology sector, says the Technion experience is exactly what New York needs.
“Thousands of students have graduated Shechtman’s course in entrepreneurship. That wouldn’t happen everywhere else. That’s not normal at most universities,” says Mr. Singer. “The Technion, because it’s so steeped in the start-up culture of Israel, is a place that thinks in terms of start-ups, that understands start-ups and entrepreneurship.”
Despite what seems to some like a perfect fit, Technion officials were at first somewhat puzzled by the New York City competition.
When New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, first wrote to the Technion president in December 2010 to invite him to enter the bidding competition, the Israelis didn’t believe he was serious.
“At first we thought it was kind of a joke,” says Avital Stein, Technion executive vice president and director general. “Here we were, 6,000 miles away across the Atlantic, and they were asking us to build a technological institute, to create a new Silicon Valley, in New York.”
Although the Technion has taken some steps to internationalize, including offering English-language courses in engineering for foreign students and joint laboratories with Singapore University, the Israeli institution had never envisaged a project the size of the one in New York. From the start, officials at the institute believed they could not do it alone.
Technion faculty members had informal talks with Columbia University on a possible joint bid, but the collaboration didn’t work out.
Then, by chance, last April, Ms. Stein found herself seated near W. Kent Fuchs, the provost of Cornell, at the centenary celebrations of Tsinghua University in Beijing. After Mr. Fuchs expressed interest in the project, she introduced him to other Technion officials, and after several months of quiet negotiations, the two universities struck a deal.
While the focus has been on how NYCTech will benefit New York City, Technion officials and others say it is a boon for their institution and Israel.
Bernard Avishai, a lecturer in business at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a political commentator who has been sharply critical of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, says the Cornell-Technion project presents a positive message about Israeli academe. He says it weakens the argument of those who advocate for a boycott of Israel, including cutting off relations with its universities, because of the treatment of Palestinians.
“I think this teases out in a very vivid way the absurdity of a boycott movement, which isolates and punishes the most globalized scientists in the world, people who represent Israel’s future in a global context,” Mr. Avishai says.
The Technion leader, of course, sees the benefits in less political terms.
Mr. Lavie says NYCTech will hire its own faculty, but the institute would be a natural place for Technion professors to spend their sabbaticals. The association with an American institution will also give Technion faculty members access to grant money from agencies like the National Institutes of Health, for which they are now ineligible.
Other Technion officials say the partnership will improve Technion research, attract a new crop of students, and potentially increase donations to the university. (The Technion established a fund-raising office in New York City several years ago.)
“It basically transforms the Technion into a household name in New York,” says Mr. Shmueli, the vice president for research. “When people think about where they would like to spend the rest of their career or where they want to do a postdoc fellowship, the Technion will be high on the list.”
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