t-hub: Technion Entrepreneurship & Innovation

The Technion is one of the main drivers of Israel’s Start-Up Nation, with more than 70% of its graduates employed in high-tech. To harness students’ abundance of creativity and innovation, the Technion created an all-encompassing home for entrepreneurial activities.

Known as t-hub (opens in a new tab), the Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, promotes entrepreneurial thinking and education through interdisciplinary curricula and programs that embrace collaboration, while focusing on the commercialization of research. Established in 2018 with a $2.7 million grant from Israel’s Council for Higher Education, t-hub offers:

• An MBA for entrepreneurs that combines a master’s degree in business administration with practical support for launching startups
• A minor in entrepreneurial leadership

The Center’s t-pro program equips students with the professional training required to pitch ideas, create prototypes, and execute a business plan. Courses include subjects such as 3D printing methods, advanced design, high-tech software programs, image processing, and virtual reality software and hardware. And students from all faculties are provided access to t-hub’s high-tech labs and equipment, as well as the “makers area” for developing prototypes.

Rounding out the training, the School of Skills and Entrepreneurship, or t-school, provides the personal “soft skills” essential to entrepreneurial thinking. Students are exposed to entrepreneurial values through workshops in motivation, decision-making, and presenting before an audience. Empowering activities such as Israel’s national BizTEC competition and the 2019 t-hack, which attracted 650 people from all over Israel, help to promote the campus’ entrepreneurial ecosystem.

t-meet offers exciting presentations by senior executives in various industries. Recent lectures included an IBM research laboratory scientist speaking about the use of artificial intelligence in medicine, including COVID-19, and a session on self-driving cars.

The Center’s additional robust programmatic offerings include:

• t-challenge helps the Technion address global challenges as a learning environment for entrepreneurship.
• t-lead is home to the new academic minor in Entrepreneurship Leadership.
• t-start is the germinator for startups.
• t-doc focuses on entrepreneurship for doctorate graduates.
• t-pro equips students with the professional coaching required to pitch ideas, create prototypes, and execute business plans.
• BizTEC is Israel’s most sought-after entrepreneurship competition.

Professor Ezri Tarazi, chair of the industrial design program at the Technion Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, heads t-hub. He is a serial entrepreneur, theorist, and world-renowned industrial designer, who has exhibited in museums such as MoMa and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. His research focuses on the areas of digital and tech-design, 3D printing for mass manufacturing, and design and biology. Among his many innovative projects, he designed and printed the world’s first artificial coral reefs.