Start-up Nation

Assuming they survive the first two or three years of the course, these cadets become “Talpions,” a title that carries prestige in both military and civilian life.

The Talpiot program as a whole is under Mafat, the IDF’s internal research and development arm, which is parallel to America’s DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Mafat has the coveted and sensitive job of assigning each Talpion to a specific unit in the IDF for their next six years of regular service.

From the beginning, the hyperelitism of the Talpiot program has attracted critics. The program almost didn’t get off the ground because military leaders did not think it would be worthwhile to invest so much in such a small group. Recently, some detractors have claimed that the program is a failure because most of the graduates do not stay in the military beyond the required nine years and do not end up in the IDF’s senior ranks.

However, though Talpiot training is optimized to maintain the IDF’s technological edge, the same combination of leadership experience and technical knowledge is ideal for creating new companies. Although the program has produced only about 650 graduates in thirty years, they have become some of Israel’s top academics and founders of the country’s most successful companies. NICE Systems, the global corporation behind call-monitoring systems used by eighty-five of the Forbes 100 companies, was founded by a team of Talpions. So was Compugen, a leader in human-genome decoding and drug development. Many of the Israeli technology companies traded on the NASDAQ were either founded by a Talpion or have alumni situated in key roles.

So the architects of Talpiot, Dothan and Yatziv, vigorously reject the criticisms. First, they argue that the interservice competition for Talpions within the IDF—which at times has had to be settled by the prime minister—speaks for itself. Second, they claim that the Talpions easily pay back the investment during their required six years of service. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the two-thirds of Talpiot graduates who end up either in academia or in technology companies continue to make a tremendous contribution to the economy and society, thereby strengthening the country in different ways.

Talpions may represent the elite of the elite in the Israeli military, but the underlying strategy behind the program’s development—to provide broad and deep training in order to produce innovative, adaptive problem solving—is evident throughout much of the military and seems to be part of the Israeli ethos: to teach people how to be very good at a lot of things, rather than excellent at one thing.

The advantage that Israel’s economy—and its society—gains from this equally dispersed national service experience was driven home to us by neither an Israeli nor an American. Gary Shainberg looks more like a sailor (of the compact, stocky variety) than a tech geek, perhaps because he is an eighteen-year veteran of the British navy. Now vice president for technology and innovation at British Telecom, he met us late one evening in a Tel Aviv bar. He was on one of his many business trips to Israel, en route to the gulf—to Dubai, actually.

“There is something about the DNA of Israeli innovation that is unexplainable,” Shainberg said. But he did have the beginnings of a theory. “I think it comes down to maturity. That’s because nowhere else in the world where people work in a center of technology innovation do they also have to do national service.”³

At eighteen, Israelis go into the army for a minimum of two to three years. If they don’t reenlist, they typically enroll at a university. “There’s a massive percentage of Israelis who go to university out of the army compared to anywhere else in the world,” said Shainberg.

In fact, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 45 percent of Israelis are university-educated, which is among the highest percentages in the world. And according to a recent IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, Israel was ranked second among sixty developed nations on the criterion of whether “university education meets the needs of a competitive economy.”⁴

By the time students finish college, they’re in their mid-twenties; some already have graduate degrees, and a large number are married. “All this changes the mental ability of the individual,” Shainberg reasoned. “They’re much more mature; they’ve got more life experience. Innovation is all about finding ideas.”