Start-up Nation

The term in the United States for this kind of crossover is a mashup. And the term itself has been rapidly morphing and acquiring new meanings. Originally referring to the merging of two or more songs into one, it has also come to designate digital and video combinations, as well as a Web application that meshes data from other sites—such as HousingMaps.com, which graphically displays craigslist rentals postings on Google Maps. An even more powerful mashup, in our view, is when innovation is born from the combination of radically different technologies and disciplines.

The companies where mashups are most common in Israel are in the medical-device and biotech sectors, where you find wind tunnel engineers and doctors collaborating on a credit card–sized device that may make injections obsolete. Or you find a company (home to beta cells, fiber optics, and algae from Yellowstone National Park) that has created an implantable artificial pancreas to treat diabetes. And then there’s a start-up that’s built around a pill that can transmit images from inside your intestines using optics technology taken from a missile’s nose cone.

Gavriel Iddan used to be a rocket scientist for Rafael, a company that is one of the principal weapons developers for the IDF. He specialized in the sophisticated electro-optical devices that allow missiles to “see” their target. Rockets might not be the first place one would look for medical technology, but Iddan had a novel idea: he would adapt the newest miniaturization technology used in missiles to develop a camera within a pill that could transmit pictures from inside the human body.

Many people told him it would be impossible to cram a camera, a transmitter, and light and energy sources into a pill that anyone could swallow. Iddan persisted, at one point going to the supermarket to buy chickens so he could test whether the prototype pill could transmit through animal tissues. He started a business around these pill cameras, or PillCams, and named his company Given Imaging.

In 2001, Given Imaging became the first company in the world to go public on Wall Street after the 9/11 attacks. By 2004, six years after its founding, Given Imaging had sold 100,000 PillCams. In early 2007, the company hit the 500,000 PillCams mark, and by the end of 2007 it had sold almost 700,000.

Today, the latest generation of PillCams painlessly transmit eighteen photographs per second, for hours, from deep within the intestines of a patient. The video produced can be viewed by a doctor in real time, in the same room or across the globe. The market remains large and has attracted major competitors; the camera giant Olympus now makes its own camera in a pill. That other companies would get into the act is not surprising, since ailments of the gastrointestinal tract are responsible for more than thirty million visits to doctors’ offices in the United States alone.

The story of Given Imaging is not just one of technology transfer from the military to the civilian sectors, or of an entrepreneur emerging from a major defense technology company. It is an example of a technology mashup, of someone combining not only the disparate fields of missiles and medicine but integrating a staggering array of technologies—from optics, to electronics, to batteries, to wireless data transmission, to software, in order to help doctors analyze what they are seeing. These types of mashups are the holy grail of technological innovation. In fact, a recent study by Tel Aviv University revealed that patents originating from Israel are distinguished globally for citing the highest number and most diverse set of precedent patents.³

One such mashup, a company that has bridged the divide between the military and medicine, is Compugen, whose three founders—president Eli Mintz, chief technology officer Simchon Faigler, and software chief Amir Natan—met in the IDF’s elite Talpiot program. Another Talpiot alumnus at Compugen, Lior Ma’ayan, said that twenty-five of the sixty mathematicians in the company joined through their network of army contacts.

In the IDF, Mintz created algorithms for sifting through reams of intelligence data to find the nuggets that have been so critical to Israel’s successes in hunting terrorist networks. When his wife, a geneticist, described the problems they had in sifting through enormous collections of genetic data, Mintz thought he might have a better way to do it.