Dan Singer - Start-up Nation

“It’s overwhelming and it’s very well coordinated,” Dotan said of the U.S. system. “It’s very challenging logistically. You’ve got to meet the tanker at the right place. You’ve got to rendezvous with the electronic warfare—if one guy’s off by a few seconds, it all falls apart. The IAF could not pull off a system like this even if it had the resources; it would just be a big mess. We’re not disciplined enough.”

In the Israeli system, almost every aircraft is a jack-of-all-trades. “You don’t go into combat without air-to-air missiles, no matter what the mission is,” said Dotan. “You could be going to hit a target in southern Lebanon, with zero chance of meeting another aircraft, and if you do, the home base is two minutes’ flying time away and someone else can come and help you. Still, there’s no such thing as going into hostile territory without air-to-air missiles.”

Similarly, nearly every aircraft in the IAF has its own onboard electronic warfare system. Unlike the U.S. Air Force, the IAF does not send up a special formation to defeat enemy radars. “You do it yourself,” Dotan noted. “It’s not as effective, but it’s a hell of a lot more flexible.” Finally, in a typical Israeli strike package, about 90 percent of the aircraft are carrying bombs and are assigned targets. In a U.S. strike package, only the strikers in the final wave are carrying bombs.

In the Israeli system, each pilot learns not only his own target but also other targets in separate formations. “If an aircraft gets hit, for example, and two aircraft split off to go after a downed pilot or to engage in air-to-air combat . . . the other pilots have to take over those targets,” Dotan explained. “You’re expected to do that—it’s actually a normal outcome. About half the time you’re hitting somebody else’s target.”

The differences in the two countries’ systems are most obvious when Israelis and Americans fly together in joint exercises. Dotan was surprised to find, in one such exercise, that American pilots were given a “dance card” that diagrammed the maneuvers the pilot was supposed to use in the fight. “We see that and say, What the hell is that? How many times do you know what the other guy is going to do?” For Dotan, who now is an investor, the American system seems “like going into a trading day saying, ‘Whatever the market does, I’m buying.’ ”

The multitasking mentality produces an environment in which job titles—and the compartmentalization that goes along with them—don’t mean much. This is something that Doug Wood noticed in making the transition from Hollywood to Jerusalem: “This is great because conventional Hollywood studios say you need a ‘projection major’ and you need a ‘production coordinator’ or you need a ‘layout head.’ But in Israel the titles are kind of arbitrary, really, because they are interchangeable in some ways and people do work on more than one thing.

“For example,” he told us, “we have a guy who is in the CG team, the computer-generated-image team, but he also works on clay 3-D models of the characters. And then we’re doing a sequence, and he came up with a funny line for the end of this thirty-second sequence that we’re producing. And I actually liked the line so much I rewrote the script and put it in there. So the CG guy crossed the disciplinary walls and ventured into modeling and into scriptwriting.”

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.