Professor Shlomo Maital, a management educator from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was invited to speak at the Hong Kong Jewish Community Centre in May on: “Entrepreneurovirus: Israel’s secret sauce for technological innovation” to a group of Technion supporters.

Maital asked why Israel generates so many startups, most of them technologydriven, and many founded by Technion graduates? The answer, he claimed, may be that the ‘bug’ of entrepreneurship is contagious. Young people work for startups, learn how to build businesses, and then leave to try it for themselves.

He told the story of a startup launched in 1981 by Yehuda and Zohar Zisapel, RAD Data Systems, which has spawned 128 startups of all kinds, and created some 15,000 jobs. The two entrepreneurs simply encouraged engineers with creative ideas to set up their own businesses ‘next door’, and offered them advice, experience, contacts and sometimes a bit of cash. The result: a thriving entrepreneurial network located around RAD in north Tel Aviv, in a high-tech area known as Atidim (“futures”, in Hebrew), where invaluable knowledge spreads informally through contacts among the RAD “alumni”.