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, 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.