Brian Blum
July 27, 2011, Updated May 8, 2012
Well-known Israeli investor Erel Margalit of JVP in Jerusalem

If you’ve got the impression that there are a lot of startups raising a lot of money in Israel, we now have the data to back it up. And another report that came out this week shows that Israel is also high on the list of patents applications.

Haaretz reported that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put Israel first on a list of venture capital investments as a percentage of GDP. The ranking, based on 2009 data, found that venture capital investments in Israel were equal to 0.18% of GDP, which ranked it higher than developed economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden.

On the patent front, Israel didn’t score quite as high, but was still among the top countries in terms of patent applications, coming in at #15. 7,266 new patent applications were submitted in 2010 and 2,293 were granted. Israel ranked slightly higher at #11 in the ratio of applications to its GDP for the years 1995-2007.

2010 was a good year for trademarks submitted to the Israel Patent, Design and Trademarks Office. According to Ynet, there were 8,017 trademark applications. Interestingly, nearly 70% of the applications were submitted by foreign applicants.

There was some bad news mixed in with the good. When it comes to the bureaucracy involved in setting up a company, specifically for startups, Israel ranked a miserable 29th out of a total of 37 countries studied. That puts us only eight places above China, the last-ranked country.

The countries where start-ups face the least amount of bureaucracy are Ireland and Germany.

But (and we have to end on good news), in a ranking of venture capital plus growth capital, Israel came in second to Ireland. Now, if only we had more good bagpipe bands, we’d soar above the Emerald Isle.

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