HAIFA — When Uzia Galil last year announced his retirement as head of the Elron complex of high-tech industries, he could look back on a 38-year career during which he was universally hailed as the father of Israel’s high-tech. His own enterprise, which started as a garage operation, now has 7,000 employees. He was awarded the Israel Prize. It had been a true success story for the teen from Romania who had come to Israel, alone, with one immediate goal: to get an education.
When I interviewed Galil in 1980, he predicted that Israel was only at the beginning of startling technological progress. There were many skeptics. Now, 22 years later, when more than one-third of Israel’s exports are in the high-tech field, I sought him out again, with many questions. He was most forthcoming, and I found that his flow of observations on the past, the present and the future were both illuminating and promising.
The current collapse in the financial markets does not worry him. Companies whose products have become obsolete will be eliminated, he said, but they will be replaced by the emergence of new ideas. The world cannot get along without high-tech and the developments of the future will eclipse those of the recent past. We have learned that what was once considered impossible will certainly be possible tomorrow. Humankind has learned to exploit knowledge, and at a rapid pace. Today it is linked to the Internet and communications. Tomorrow it will be biotechnology and after that, genetics.
Israel has a commanding position in the world, and will continue to retain it. Why? Jewish genes, the Jewish brain? Galil hedged. Two factors played a dominant role in making possible Israel’s emergence in this field. One was the security needs of the country, which created research conditions in which initiative and originality flourished. The pressures of national defense made it possible to obtain the necessary budgets, leading to the development of creative progress in electronic equipment.
The second element is the existence in the country of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, which, even before the creation of the state, had begun to turn out engineers and technologists of high quality. Early in his career, Galil had been head of the electronics program in its pioneering days at the Technion.
The great majority of the top leaders in Israel’s miracle industries are Technion graduates. But what about the brain drain? Isn’t Israel losing some of its best talents, attracted by opportunities in the United States?
There is no brain drain, Galil insisted. Large numbers of talented people who had left have now returned to Israel, enriched by their experience abroad. Israeli salaries in the high-tech field are competitive with those paid abroad.
One reason for the success of Israel’s companies may be that the absence of a local market of any size led them to search for markets elsewhere. Indeed, Israel pioneered in what is today called globalization. It was not easy sailing. Israelis had the ideas and the products, but they lacked skills in both management and marketing. Galil recalled that as early as 1968, his concern had produced Elbit 100, one of the first mini-computers. Proudly they displayed it at an industrial convention overseas. There was little reaction to it, because it had not been preceded and accompanied by the necessary promotion and advertising.
The lessons were learned, and today emphasis is placed on what Galil calls the two-legged companies, one leg based on the talents and skills and production in Israel, and the other on the promotional skills and know-how of American companies.
He views the future with great optimism. To the extent that the initiators are young, their operations will be more daring. They have fewer brakes. Experience may be important, but it is also important to have vision and not to be chained to the past. It is still possible to procure capital on the basis of a concept, and even before actual production. In English, the channel is called a venture fund, while in Hebrew, perhaps more hesitantly, it is called sikun, risk.
If the future is so bright, why did he quit? The future belongs to the youth, he said, but Galil has not quit. Today he devotes his vision and his talents to encouraging and guiding these young people, and has set up an umbrella company under whose helpful cover new, young concerns are helped and advised on breaking into the big time. Appropriately, the name of Galil’s new pioneering effort is Uzia, Yizum V’nihul, which can be translated as “Uzia, Initiatives and Management.”