If Israel is the Startup Nation, Tel Aviv University (TAU) is its backbone. A world-leading innovation policy and research firm called Startup Genome has ranked TAU as the fifth of the world – reflecting the involvement of alumni of the world’s leading universities in entrepreneurship and the establishment of companies that have advanced beyond the startup stage and their worth is estimated at $50 million or more.
TAU has thus become the only non-American university to be ranked in the top 10 by Startup Genome for 2021 and was fifth from the top of the list, behind Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. The others on the Top Ten included Cornell University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Some universities were listed several times, with different schools being named, including Harvard University and Harvard’s Business School, for example, and Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“This is a very significant achievement for both Tel Aviv University and the State of Israel,” said Prof. Moshe Zviran, dean of TAU’s Coller School of Management and chief entrepreneurship and innovation officer there.
According to the ranking, some 1,300 of the school’s slumni have established active companies in a variety of fields over the past decades. About40 of them achieve the status of “scaleup companies” that have advanced beyond the startup stage and surpassed a worth of $50 million.
“Israel, in general, and TAU as its leading entrepreneurial university, form fertile ground for uniquely creative young entrepreneurs who establish independent companies and hold key positions in the world’s leading corporations,” Zviran declared.
Startup Genome is the world-leading policy advisory and research organization for governments and public-private partnerships committed to accelerating the success of their startup ecosystem, having advised more than 100 clients across 38 countries.
Since 2012, San Francisco-based Startup Genome has been the first organization to release comprehensive research reports that benchmark startup ecosystems globally. Currently led by J.F. Gauthier and Marc Penzel, the San Francisco-based startup has been the first organization to capture the requirements of a startup ecosystem in a data-driven framework.
A startup ecosystem is formed by people, startups in their various stages and various types of organizations in a location (physical or virtual), interacting as a system to create and scale new startup companies. A startup ecosystem is formed by people, startups in their various stages and various types of organizations in a location (physical or virtual), interacting as a system to create and scale new startup companies.
These organizations can be further divided into categories such as universities, funding organizations, support organizations such as incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces, research organizations, service provider organizations like legal and financial services and large corporations.
Investors are linked together through shared events, activities, locations and interactions. Startup ecosystems encompass the network of interactions among people, organizations and their environment
In addition, resources like skills, time and money are also essential components of a start-up ecosystem. The resources that flow through ecosystems are obtained primarily from the meetings between people and organizations that are an active part of those startup ecosystems. These interactions help to create new potential startups and/or to strengthen the already existing ones.
