Israel’s Top Defense Firm Looks To The East – And The West – For Innovation

Israel Aerospace Industries, the country’s state-owned and largest defense firm, has embarked on a series of research partnerships with foreign universities for what the company’s head of R&D says are strictly non-military endeavors. 

Just four months after announcing a partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi to collaborate on applied research, IAI has announced similar agreements with Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All three schools are known for their technological research and development. 

IAI’s Executive VP Technologies, R&D and Innovation Eytan Eshel tells NoCamels that the collaborations are in no small part down to the company’s understanding of the importance of automation and AI in future technologies and the need for a better vision of where these sectors are headed.  

“With AI technology, most of the time you’re not able to predict exactly what the next step will be,” Eshel says. 

“Putting our skills and researchers together with what they are doing there, I think will give us a better understanding of this domain.” 

He says that automation and AI go hand in hand and therefore the research projects will focus on both. 

“We see the future will be unmanned systems, and when you involve autonomous systems, you also need to involve AI algorithms and AI capabilities,” he explains. 

“Trying to get exposure for a very basic question: how do you create trust in the system and the externability of the algorithms? This is a very broad question that many institutes in the world are dealing with.”  

IAI specializes in technology for all three branches of the Israeli military – air, land and sea – as well as homeland security and space. It is a major manufacturer of Israel’s defensive capabilities, most notably the Iron Dome and Arrow air defense systems, as well as the producer of the country’s range of ballistic missiles. 

But Eshel is adamant that the work being done during these collaborations is strictly civilian. 

“Twenty-five to 30 percent of our business is purely civilian,” he says. This includes maintenance and support services for commercial aviation fleets and the production of non-military aircraft such as cargo planes and private jets. 

Eshel explains that IAI already has a strong tradition of fostering civilian R&D, entrepreneurship and innovation inside Israel, with close ties to the nation’s high-tech and academic communities. 

“We spend almost $400 million [per year] on purely R&D,” he says. “We have this budget in order to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. We established an Innovation Center in Tel Aviv in the heart of the startup ecosystem, with very tight links to Israeli academia.” 

This close relationship includes the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv Innovation Center also issues a call every four months for innovation proposals, both from startups and IAI personnel, and helps bring viable ideas to the proof of concept stage and for some even create a business plan. 

From there, Eshel explains, it was a natural step to open IAI up beyond the worlds of Israeli academia and high-tech, including exploring relationships abroad. 

“We are sharing research and data trying to create something unique,” he says. “We bring our data and skills and people to collaborate with their teams.” 

The company recently also opened a visitors center in Washington, DC, which Eshel says could become a hub for US startups. This would provide those young companies with the benefits of collaborating with a very advanced high-tech company that can challenge them, mentor them and help them to develop their ideas. 

It would also give IAI more exposure to the DNA of American startups, he says. 

“I think it’s a win-win solution.”  

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