Fractal Nations

Fractal Nations

Why Some Countries Are More Innovative Than Others

Have you ever asked yourself: What makes a country innately successful at innovation?

Let’s take two examples of the US and Israel, possibly the two nations with the greatest amount of technological innovation – with the US holding the highest number of patents per capita, and Israel having the highest number of startups per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Many people attribute their common success to similar characteristics shared between the two nations: heterogeneous and multi-faceted immigrant populations, a huge amount of investment in defense and government (which becomes a catalyst for commercial innovation), strong democratic values, commitment to intellectual property protection, and educational systems that emphasize independence, debate, and experimentalism.

In my opinion, however, these reasons don’t completely account for the success of either country. Instead, it’s a shared essence bubbling beneath the surface that bind both countries together as successful innovators: both countries share a deep respect for the entrepreneurial spirit because the countries themselves are quintessential startups.

A Whole Equal to Each Individual Part

I compare both the US and Israel to the geometric concept of a fractal – an infinitely complex pattern that, when closely examined, contains the same exact pattern in smaller and larger scales. It’s basically a huge system where the tiniest element of that system is an exact microcosm of the entire system.

The founding vision of the United States was a country with religious freedom and equality for all. This vision succeeded in persuading many immigrants to leave their native land and build the country, later known as the “land of opportunity.”

With the breakout of the Gold Rush and the expansion of the country to the West coast, the pioneer spirit deeply entrenched itself in American culture. The willingness to take big risks, trust diverse groups of strangers, and improvise quickly with few resources are all characteristics of the national identity that resulted from the American vision. It shouldn’t be a surprise that these are also perhaps the most important qualities of any successful startup.

Let’s take Israel, a smaller yet in many ways equally successful startup nation. This 66-year-old Middle Eastern country with only 8 million inhabitants and 72 companies listed on the NASDAQ also merits a place as a giant of technological innovation.

Israel, too, is part of a vision of a Jewish nation that provides a safe haven for Jews anywhere in the world, which has also succeeded in gathering heterogeneous immigrants from all over the world to build a country from scratch with little or no resources. In the days of the early founding of the state, it didn’t matter who you were or where you were from – only that you were helping to build the country.

 A Top-Down Approach to Innovation

Without a doubt, some of Israel’s greatest natural resources are the minds, work ethic and innate confidence of its people, who are often raised to question the status quo and, when appropriate, challenge authority. But in their bestselling book Start-up Nation, authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer also give credit for the country’s global success on its supportive government policies. The Israeli government has proven it is not afraid to take chances by providing large amounts of financial support of commercial R&D in an effort to jumpstart innovation.

The results speak for themselves: Israel boasts the highest concentration of engineers in the world  and has attracted more than twice as much venture capital funding per person than the United States and 30 times more than Europe.

We see a similar approach from the US government. Presiding over a country of dreamers—people who believe that hard work and earnest living can offer a certain level of upward mobility—the US government has reinforced this belief in “The American Dream” be delivering tax breaks, investments and public policies that have fostered and even celebrated a culture of innovation.

Both the US and Israel are very much startup nations. Whether focusing on aviation technologies, space technologies, the Internet, nanotechnology or mobile, they are constantly reinventing themselves by embracing risk, emphasizing innovation and encouraging individual freedom.

For both countries, these values can be found from the very top of the government institutions down to the corporate level, family structures and within individual persons. The US and Israel each have a set of smaller parts replicating the patterns of the whole that make companies both large and small microcosms of the nation to which they belong. And for both countries, because they have been successful on a large scale as nations, many of the companies and organizations that make up their smaller scales have been successful as well—just like fractals.

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This post was originally published on Entrepreneur

 

Sheree Akirav

Senior Account Manager at monday.com

8y

Interesting facts.

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