Start-up Nation

Today, Israel has eight universities and twenty-seven colleges. Four of them are in the top 150 worldwide universities and seven are in the top 100 Asia Pacific universities. None of them are satellite campuses from abroad. Israeli research institutions were also the first in the world to commercialize academic discoveries.

In 1959 the Weizmann Institute established Yeda (which means “knowledge” in Hebrew) to market its research. Yeda has since spawned thousands of successful medical technology products and companies. Between 2001 and 2004, the institute amassed one billion shekels (more than $200 million) in royalty revenues. By 2006, Yeda was ranked first in income royalties among world academic institutes.¹⁷

Several years after the creation of Yeda, the Hebrew University founded its own technology transfer company, called Yissum (a word for “implementation” in Hebrew). Yissum earns over $1 billion annually in sales of Hebrew University–based research and has registered 5,500 patents and 1,600 inventions. Two-thirds of its 2007 inventions were in biotechnology, a tenth were in agricultural technology, and another tenth were in computer science and engineering products. The research has been sold to Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Intel, Nestlé, Lucent Technologies, and many other multinational companies. Overall, Yissum was recently ranked twelfth—after ten American universities and one British university— in global biotech patent rankings (Tel Aviv University is ranked twenty-first).

Israel, a nation of immigrants, has continually been dependent on successive waves of immigration to grow its economy. It is in large part thanks to these immigrants that Israel currently has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country and produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation—109 per 10,000 people.¹⁸ Jewish newcomers and their non-Jewish family members are readily granted residency, citizenship, and benefits. Israel is universally regarded as highly entrepreneurial and—like the IDF—dismissive of the strictures of hierarchy.

In the Persian Gulf, however, governments will allow residency visas for only up to three years, nothing longer—even for fellow Muslims and Arabs. There is no path to citizenship in these countries. So globally sought-after researchers have been unwilling to relocate their families in meaningful numbers and invest their careers in an institution whose host country stifles free speech, academic freedom, and government transparency and puts a time limit on residency. While five- or ten-year residency visas have been considered in several gulf Arab countries, no government has ever ultimately allowed for them.

These residency restrictions are also symptomatic of a larger obstacle to attracting academics: the few research professionals who have shown up quickly became aware of the government’s desire to keep them on the outskirts. The laws emanate from the pressure on governments to be responsive to Arab nationalism broadly, and sovereign nationalism specifically. For example, an Emirati woman who marries an expat must give up her citizenship, and their children will not be issued a UAE passport or any of the government’s welfare benefits.

One of the major challenges to a high-growth entrepreneurial culture elsewhere in the Arab world—beyond just the gulf—is that the teaching models in primary and secondary schools and even the universities are focused on rote memorization. According to Hassan Bealaway, an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Education, learning is more about systems, standards, and deference rather than experimentation. It is much more the Columbia model than the Apollo.

This emphasis on standardization has shaped an education policy that defines success by measuring inputs rather than outcomes. For example, according to a study produced by the Persian Gulf offices of McKinsey & Company, Arab governments have been consumed with the number of teachers and investments in infrastructure—buildings and now computers—in hopes of improving their students’ performance. But the results of the recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ranked Saudi students forty-third out of forty-five (Saudi Arabia was even behind Botswana, which was forty-second).¹⁹