An Israeli business school claims to offer its international students some of “the secrets behind ‘Jewish genius’ and Israeli success” as a pre-eminent “start-up nation”. Lahav Executive Education, which bills itself “the leading developer and provider of executive education in Israel”, is a unit of the Recanati Business School at Tel Aviv University, the country’s largest higher education institution.

In recent years, Lahav has developed management programmes for entrepreneurs, executives and government officials, including joint international MBAs with the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University in the US, and shorter courses on doing business, in Israel.

In December 2013, 20 young entrepreneurs selected by the South Korean government signed up for an accelerator programme at Lahav, which is currently hosting a similar programme for 56 students from Argentina and Brazil and will shortly welcome a delegation from a large Italian bank.

Lahav literature offers a number of reasons why Israel has “more high-tech start-ups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country in the world” and why leading technology companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft “operate their largest and most productive labs and research facilities” out of Israel. For a start, it says that compulsory military service “provides young Israelis with unique experiences and extensive responsibilities in a relatively autonomous environment where creativity, intelligence and the ability to improvise are highly valued”.

Secondly, as a small country with a large immigrant population, Israel offers its entrepreneurs close proximity to investors and a “born-global” outlook based on an awareness that success can come only from looking beyond the restricted domestic market and “commit[ting] resources to international ventures”, claims Lahav. Government policies supportive of innovation and effective mechanisms for technology transfer between the academy and industry are also seen as important factors in Israel’s success.

Among the regular visitors to the business school, as Lahav’s CEO Udi Aharoni tells it, are “delegations from China representing very big companies”. In this case, Lahav’s approach is “all about collaboration”. Israeli start-ups have “the advantages of cutting corners, being very flexible and moving very fast,” he says.

“If you can combine that with the Chinese ability to operate on a large scale, it’s a win-win situation. People from larger countries come and tap into the Israeli entrepreneurial mindset and our big ideas. Then they go away and upscale them elsewhere,” says Aharoni.

(Excerpted and adapted from )