This is what MK Benny Alon, chairman of the Knesset's science and technology committee, said this week at a meeting in collaboration with the heads of the Ra'anana conference on national high-tech policy.
Avi Blizovsky, The People editor, DailyMaily
"The Israeli high-tech industry must unite in creating a campaign that explains the dangers it faces if the reforms required to secure its future are not carried out immediately," said yesterday (Wednesday), the chairman of the Knesset's Science and Technology Committee, MK Benny Alon, at a special meeting which dealt with the Israeli hi-tech industry, in collaboration with the heads of the Ra'anana Conference on National Hi-Tech Policy. The meeting focused on the two main obstacles facing the continued development of the high-tech industry: the need to diversify funding sources and train personnel in the engineering and scientific fields.
On the same topic: the growth engine of Israeli high-tech is in danger
“In what I call today's 'telenovela culture', a paid campaign is necessary to attract the free press. The high-tech industry was built by a small public, but there is a difference between creating a revolution and preserving it afterwards. This step is less heroic and fewer people are enthusiastic about doing it," said MK Alon at the preliminary meeting for the Ra'anana conference, which will be held this coming Tuesday, June 24, at the performing arts center in Ra'anana.
The chairman of the Ra'anana conference, Shlomo Gerdman, said at the yeshiva that it is about the survival of the high-tech industry and even the survival of the country. "Apparently, it is a prosperous industry whose workers are rich, but in fact it is a plane flying at night, with the entire population of Israel on board, with the captain being the prime minister and the ministers sitting in the business department. Everyone is happy and enjoying themselves, but they don't know that the plane is approaching the side of a mountain and may crash into it. Every industry consists of two components necessary for growth: professional personnel, and money - both from government investments and from private parties. Happily, most of the funds come from private capital, but there is definitely room for government support in regards to the role of the chief scientist and support for innovation."
Gordman described the threats to the high-tech industry from China and India, who according to him are flooding the world with hundreds of thousands of engineers, and emphasized the huge investments in R&D in these countries - about 136 billion dollars in China in 2006, compared to about 300 million dollars in Israel in the same year. He pointed out that the Ra'anana conference offers solutions for both issues - both in the field of manpower and in the field of financing. "As for manpower, in the short term ultra-Orthodox and members of minorities must be converted to work in high-tech, bring back Israeli scientists and engineers from abroad and recruit Jewish engineers and scientists from abroad to immigrate to Israel," Gerdman said. "As for the field of financing, it should be made easier for institutional investors to invest in Israeli high-tech, even half a percent of their capital. Such an investment will make it possible to diversify the mix of investors in the industry, because 95% of the investments today originate from foreign investors, most of them American, and these may change their taste and direct their money to China tomorrow morning."
The CEO of the Electronics and Software Industries Association, Shlomo Wax, said that a heavy cloud is hovering over the high-tech industry, threatening all its achievements. According to him, this cloud consists of several threats, each of which is enough to collapse it. The first threat, according to him, is that the world has learned what is the inherent potential in the high-tech industry and what is its effect on growth. The number of academy graduates in the fields of computing all over the world is huge, said Wax, and they will surpass the Israeli industry - not only in quantity, but also in quality. In addition, accept the fact that the dollar has fallen in Israel more than anywhere else, this issue has many consequences. Wax also provided data according to which many budgets, including the R&D fund budget for product development and the chief scientist's budget, have decreased by dozens of percent since 2002.
According to Vox, another threat facing the high-tech industry comes from a new direction: the directive to reduce the participation of the chief scientist in the center of the country and allocate most of his budget to the periphery. "The periphery is unable to absorb these investments, and what will happen in the end is that the budgets will remain in the treasury and will not be used for the purpose for which they were intended - the encouragement of investment in research and development," said Wax, who also addressed the issue of education and said that we must increase the manpower based on the children growing up here. Because there won't be another source like the immigration from Russia in the nineties."
