National Innovation infrastructure

Last week I spent some time at the University of Algarve in Faro (Portugal). It was a Conference on Sustainable Innovation, and the presentations were most interesting. It was my first visit to Portugal in over five years, and I was most interested in two aspects – the current economic situation; and the Innovation atmosphere in the country.
One of the presentation dealt with the spin-off activity of the university research results. It was most interesting to compare the roles of the Technology Transfer unit in Portugal with that of a Technology Transfer Company in Israel. The unit in Portugal has to run a competition in order to stimulate ideas and to find ideas or technologies to be commercialized. It than trains the entrepreneurs and helps them raise the funds, hosts them (for a fee) and when ready lunches them into the world. The unit does not hold equity in the firms. Of course such close mentoring means that the number of firms that can be taken care off is limited.
The Israeli TTC gets the ideas reported by the scientists in the university, it has to filter them, if ready for spinning, than it recruits a team leader, let him raise the funds or helps the team get into a technology incubator. The TTC will hold equity, an if possible also license the technology to the firm it span-off. Theoretically the TTC can Spin-off as many firms as there are ideas.
Why do the two entities follow different models? The obvious answer has two parts: on the one hand the natural tendency to seek commercialization of research results or of ideas is probably higher in Israel; on the other hand the infrastructure is more diversified, the technology incubators, the VC sector and other assisting tools are more prevalent in Israel allowing the TTC to focus on its main function.
The natural tendency is misleading, it is only partly natural. A major part of it lies in the local culture and education. Encouraging individualism, free thinking and non conservative solutions has been dominant in Israeli culture. Admiring the ability to improvise rather than plan, to give all you have to reach a goal is a basic characteristic of the culture. Portugal has stressed conformism and order, accuracy and planning.
If one goes back in time to the late 1980's, Israel was not much different. Small number of entrepreneurs, little supportive infrastructure etc., that means that the transformation of the Portuguese current situation to one more resembling Israel's can be achieved. How?
I would suggest the following:
It is important to recall that creating an infrastructure requires enough potential projects in the pipeline otherwise a sense of misfit is felt, which could lead to negative results. If you create a 100 venture capital funds that will not have enough projects, the failure to return the investment would assure that it would take a long time for the venture capital market to recover. Therefore there is no need to copy entire systems but rather let them evolve. First create the demand, educate for innovation, encourage project creation, than invite the assistive "tools" or build them according to demand.
What type of education? How can it be done?
For that in the next post…….