The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa has won a NIS 10 million grant from the Council for Higher Education to set up an entrepreneurship and innovation center. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Chair of the Council for Higher Education Planning and Budgeting Committee Prof. Yaffa Zilbershats announced the award.
The grant will be used to establish t-hub - The Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, based on the strategic plan for entrepreneurship and innovation formulated by the university over the past two years. Technion is the only academic institution to win the competition individually.
Technion president Prof. Peretz Lavie said, “The grant from the Council for Higher Education comes at a perfect time. Two years ago we initiated a comprehensive initiative aimed at developing and promoting entrepreneurship and innovation activities on the Haifa campus connecting them to the new branches of Technion in New York and China. The grant will enable the Technion to make a significant change in the scope of its entrepreneurial activities and to realize the establishment of the Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, t-hub, which will take the entrepreneurial culture on campus to new heights.”
The Technion has nurtured entrepreneurial thinking for many years and has pioneered the development of curricula for all students. The first entrepreneurship course was founded 30 years ago on campus, initiated by Prof. Dan Shechtman, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry.
Since 1995, Technion alumni have established more than 1,600 companies that have generated more than $30 billion and created nearly 100,000 jobs. The university is also regarded worldwide as an incubator that fosters entrepreneurship and was recently ranked 39th in the world in the number of patents registered in the US in 2017. A recent example is Mazor Robotics, which started out in the robotics lab of Prof. Moshe Shoham of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Technion and was recently sold to Medtronic for $1.6 billion.
“Technion goals in entrepreneurship and innovation are to develop and promote technological and scientific excellence among its students, teachers, and researchers while providing tools for creative and entrepreneurial thinking,” said Prof. Adam Shwartz, Technion Senior Executive Vice President and Chair of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center. “These tools are designed to solve engineering, technological and scientific challenges over the course of a professional career - whether in start-up companies, in industrial, civilian, or security companies, in companies that benefit the public or in academia. Technion will integrate such thinking and activity in all its components and will establish the Entrepreneurship Center to concentrate, promote, and empower the entrepreneurial culture throughout the campus.”
t-hub will be headed by Prof. Eyal Zussman, the Center’s academic director and Dr. Dana Sheffer. The Technion’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center has many partners among Israel’s leading industrial and hi-tech companies including Teva, Rafael, and Alpha Omega.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 11, 2018
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