Israel’s Innovation Ecosystem as a Blueprint for Bioconvergence

In 2018, the State of Israel was one of the first in the world to recognize the Bioconvergence domain as a promising field with extraordinary economic potential. Israel recognized that this field could address some of the key challenges facing the world in the coming decades, such as health, security, climate, and more, as well as the challenges it faces. The Israel Innovation Authority, a government arm that promotes the country’s high-tech industry, began promoting the concept of Bioconvergence among national R&D leaders, in order to promote a national plan. In 2022, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Israel published a plan that was adopted by all R&D entities in the Israeli government and launched with the aim of advancing the domain in concrete ways and with the goal of nourishing a new economic growth engine in Israel. Israel has long been known as “the Startup Nation,” given its history of successes in technology and science, which have led to countless startup companies. Throughout the country’s history, since its establishment in 1948, its leaders in technology and science knew how to identify unique technological fields that would result in significant returns. Inventions in the fields of digital printing, cybersecurity, communication, food tech, precision agriculture, and much more were made in Israel. In this chapter, we will describe why Israel became a hub for extraordinary technological inventions? we will address how was the field of Bioconvergence chosen as the basis for a national plan as a new economic growth engine, what the program includes, and how it will be implemented.