Can entrepreneurship be leveraged to resolve decades of ethnic conflict? While Jews and Arabs are equal citizens in Israel, both groups have strong bias and prejudice towards each other. This escalates tension, misunderstanding, lack of communication and as a whole, negatively impacts the cohesiveness of Israel’s society. Research has shown that having conflicting groups meet on an equal basis and perform meaningful work together, can reduce prejudice, bias and fear from one another. Hence, TAU EC decided to open an Arab-Jewish Start-up Accelerator program where each start-up team must be composed of Jews and Arabs. How the program addresses the conflict? • Accelerator programs are very attractive. Start-up teams are looking to join high-quality programs to advance their company. We believed that a TAU accelerator with highly reputable workshop leaders and mentors, will attract start-up teams regardless of the bicultural requirement.

• This is a highly-intensive program. Team members are required to work closely together, trust each other and drive together to become the winning team. The result is a team atmosphere where Arabs and Jews are members, not adversaries.

• The program broadens each groups’ network of contacts thus further enables assimilation of both groups as now they have the ability to broaden their business ties in each other’s society.

The accelerator is underway. Nine teams, 38 students, 11 Arabs and 27 Jews. 25% of mentors are from the Arab society. It is quite exciting to see the teams working together and relationships evolve. The US Embassy in Israel recognized the program and elected it for one of its grants.

By establishing the Entrepreneurship Center, our objective is to drive an infrastructural and sustainable change in TAU. Impacting not just students but also the academic staff injecting the entrepreneurial mindset and tool-kit to their daily work as researchers and teachers. A typical strategy to establish an EC would be to start with extracurricular programs. These do not need to adhere to academic regulation and hence, easy to establish. However, the institutional impact is low to non-existent. To drive an infrastructural change, one must touch the “holy-grail” of the academia: either research or education. These are the two key functions of an academic institution. This is where the attention and investments are. Hence, a change in one of these dimensions creates a deep impact on the institution.

Our approach was to start with the academic education. One strategy would be, to work with one or two departments, start a pilot and move on from there. However, we felt that the right way to create a real and lasting impact is to approach all departments in parallel. Once two of them agreed to assimilate entrepreneurship studies as part of their degree program, the domino effect worked and other departments joined. This was a risky approach, but isn’t it what entrepreneurship is all about?

The following is a mix of actual future plans and general aspirations. Industry Projects – we are looking to start two major ‘challenges’ – a year-long project based on real industry needs involving research and implementation. These will be sponsored, mentored and escorted by leading industrial companies in Israel.

Academic studies – we plan to expand the scope of entrepreneurship studies to 32 credits enabling students to go beyond practical entrepreneurship and study the academic body of research developing critical thinking of methods, societal impact and more.

Academic Research – to further engage the academic staff, we would like to encourage diverse multi-disciplinary research in the field of entrepreneurship. There are multitude of aspects to entrepreneurship in social sciences, law, and other disciplines. Research grants are key to engaging academic staff.