Key reasons for Israel’s innovation success Unique Society Educated & skilled workforce: Ranked 2nd in the world in percentage of engineers and scientists in the work force Israel experienced several waves of highly educated immigrants coming from all over the world Young people already receive a high technical training during their military service and are equipped with a high sense of responsibility and success orientation Market Lack of natural resources led to a scientific-technological innovation system developed to ensure Israelis a high quality of life The country’s small size and geographical isolation from its neighbors enhanced domestic dynamics Government Support The government’s technology incubator program supports innovation and start-ups’ growth Demand for technical innovations for defense and military purposes The ‘Investment Law’ enables foreign companies to benefit from a company tax rate of only 10%, and investment grants of up to 24%. Strong R&D Focus No. 1 in the world in R&D expenditure per capita Israel invests about 4.25% of its GDP in R&D, which is the highest ratio of any country in the world Israel’s universities are ranked among the world’s leading research institutes VC Industry Ranked 5th in the world for venture capital availability Israel’s venture capital industry has approximately 70 active venture capital funds, of which 14 are international VCs with offices in Israel Highly innovative & strong managerial entrepreneurship Israeli managers were ranked 2nd in the world for business entrepreneurship Israel is world renowned as being the “start-up nation” and is the world leader for number of start-ups per capita with ~5,000 active technology start-ups Profit-driven Israeli innovations include a long list of market firsts such as disk-on-key technology, IP telephony, ZIP compression, the ingestible pill-size camera, modern drip- irrigation technology, ICQ instant messenger, and many more Leading multinational companies Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, IBM, Intel, SAP, Cisco, Johnson and Johnson and over 300 global tech leaders have local presence in Israel 13