High-tech partners: 
well-structured and creative

Israel and Germany have a lot in common – especially when it comes to innovative technologies. For one thing, Israel has become an important high-tech trading partner for Germany. For another, the two countries work closely together in research and development.

In terms of the number of patent applications and start-ups in the technology sector, Israel is now one of the leading economic and research nations in the world. This attracted the attention of the high-tech industry a long time ago. Like American corpor­ations such as Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Google, German giants like SAP, Software AG and Deutsche Telekom have set up their own research and development centres in a region affectionately known as Silicon Wadi. In terms of its importance as a high-tech incubator, Israel is now seen as number two in the world after Silicon Valley, California.

“The main reason why the major high-tech companies come to Israel is that Israeli developers have very special qualities,” explains Mickey Steiner, Head of SAP Labs Israel in Ra’anana. “They need the challenge, so the best thing you can do is to tell them that something is impossible – then they can’t wait to prove you wrong. And the result might well be completely different – in a positive sense – from what you would ever have thought.”

Steiner believes Israel is the place to be if you want a creative solution. The SAP researcher reckons that the combination of German and Israeli engineering skills is therefore ideal. The German approach, he says, is very methodical: “You go through the planned process from the beginning to the end. The route is very structured,” Mickey Steiner observes. “Israeli devel­opers prefer to look at where the road is leading.”

He also sees cultural advantages in German-Israeli cooperation. “Many Israelis feel that cooperation with Americans works especially well. After all, the USA is a huge country where they all speak one language, while Europe is a patchwork of different cultures, governments and lan­guages,” Mickey Steiner says. However, he believes that Israelis and Germans are much closer at the interpersonal level – for example in their attitude and in their communication culture. “Both are relatively direct and come straight to the point.”

In some projects, the approximately 120-strong SAP research team in Israel collaborates with colleagues in Germany, the USA and India; in others it searches for sol­utions on its own. “We in Israel specialize on security, for example, which is not very surprising, bearing in mind our geopolitical location,” says the Head of SAP Labs. The more mobile the world becomes and the more information is stored in the virtual data cloud, he adds, the more import­ant protection against cybercrime becomes. In addition, the SAP team in Israel is also watching the start-up scene in Silicon Wadi very closely: “If good solutions have already been developed for our customers, we no longer even need to invent them and can help the young companies to launch them onto market.”

Deutsche Telekom AG is also present in Israel with an innovation lab at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). More than a hundred students and researchers are working at the BGU T-Labs in the Negev Desert on different projects relating to network security and customer analysis. At the end of 2012, René Obermann, then CEO of Deutsche Telekom, was presented the Ben Gurion Leadership Award. According to the laudatory speech, the award “re­cognizes those leaders who see the potential for growth and development in ideas that are only just emerging. Those people who capture the moment and turn it into the future.” In his acceptance speech, Obermann spoke of 40 innovations that Deutsche Telekom had recently exhibited at a trade show, and many – or at least parts – of them had originated at the Israeli T-Labs. Israel was an important partner, especially in security research.

Fighting cybercrime was one of many priorities in German-Israeli collaborations. Overall, former Deutsche Telekom CEO Obermann praised Israel as a “global source of innovation, research and invention.” Many other German entrepreneurs would certainly agree with that. ▪

Sybille Wilhelm