Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

Last week the team met with Dr. Miri Yemini, Director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (EIC) at the Shamoon College of Engineering, and lecturer at the Ben-Gurion University.

Through her work at the EIC, Dr. Yemini advances technological entrepreneurship in Israel’s peripheral regions. Yemini believes that such innovation provides an invaluable opportunity for populations like women and minorities, which are normally excluded from Israel’s famous high-tech industry, to break through their current glass ceiling. The center provides pro-bono support to technology entrepreneurs seeking to start a company in the Negev. Such support includes instruction on how to best develop a startup, assistance in gaining access to research funds, and access to platforms for strengthening the connection between whichever business and the relevant academic professionals.

What distinguishes Yemini’s approach from others is that it encourages bottom-up economic development. The center bases its model on the concept of  self-assembly, a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction. The endogenous nature of this model is similar to that of the team’s model, which also calls for bottom-up regional organization. We believe that only through such organization can regions identify their unique assets and harness them to create globally competitive industries.