Seven young members of the fledgling Taiwan-Israel Entrepreneurship Association are in Israel for one month to learn about the strong Israeli biomed sector.
Founded by Irwin Jacobs, cofounder and former chairman of Qualcomm, the Jacobs TIX Institute at National Tsing Hua University initiated the association in cooperation with student groups at several Taiwanese universities to forge closer ties between Taiwanese and Israeli startups and to bring fresh Israeli ideas to the Taiwan startup ecosystem.
They’re visiting incubators, accelerators and university laboratories and technology-transfer companies with the idea of building an information integration platform for further connections and information sharing between both countries.
This first trip is focused on learning more about Israel’s innovative medical devices and possible opportunities for partnerships with academia and industry.
Among their stops was a meeting with 23 Israeli biomed entrepreneurs at a meeting of the Jerusalem Business Networking Forum’s Biomed section exploring the pitfalls of drug development.
“The reason we chose Israel is that Israel has the highest density of tech startups in the whole world,” says Stella Chen, cofounder of the Taiwan-Israel Entrepreneurship Association. “The Global Innovation Index report indicates that Israel is the ‘Start-Up Nation,’ which is at the top of the ranking indexes.”
“Because we speak Chinese, we can help Israeli entrepreneurs doing business in our part of the world,” Chen adds.