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Technology Incubators

30 Aug, 1999 17:56




On this page:

  1. Background
  2. Incubator Directory


1. Background

The incubator program aims to turn technological ideas into commercial successes. It operates under the aegis of the Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The incubators provide fledgling enterprises with a supportive framework, including administrative back-up and consulting services, while the Office of the Chief Scientist provides finance. An enterprise can generally remain within an incubator for two years, within which time it is expected to complete development of its product and find independent sources of finance.

An incubator may be independent, or backed by an investor, or part of an established company. Government support is given on different terms in each case.

Most of the incubators are located outside the central Tel Aviv-Gush Dan area.

There are about 200 projects in the independent incubators. The main R&D fields are chemical and electrochemical, mechanical and electromechanical, software, electronics, biotechnology, and computers. The applications for the technologies being developed are predominantly in industrial and control processes, medicine and cosmetics, and transport and communications, with agriculture also a significant beneficiary.

The incubator program began as a response to the influx of scientists and engineers from the countries of the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, when immigration from those countries was at its height. Immigration has since abated, and the effectiveness of the scheme, and of other aspects of government support for R&D, is now being questioned, though the Office of the Chief Scientist claims a high success rate for incubator enterprises, and the scheme has been held up internationally as a model of its kind.

For further details, see Investment Incentives. The Office of the Chief Scientist site provides a full guide to the incubator scheme and to the incubators themselves, plus a project database. The site does not however include incubators that operate within companies.

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