What Texas can learn from Israel: Takeaways from the Texas-Israel Alliance Healthcare & Life Sciences Innovation Conference
This past Friday (Oct. 25, 2019) the Texas-Israel Alliance held its Healthcare & Life Sciences Innovation Conference , which was conveniently hosted by UT Southwestern Medical Center, where I work. The event presented 5~6 panel discussions and fireside chats that featured speakers from a wide variety of institutions and business entities including the FDA, Microsoft, Rabin Medical Center, NASA, Start-up Nation Central, several venture capital firms, and others. All of the featured talks were of uniformly high quality, but one stood out for me in terms of 1) delivering insights into what makes the Israeli innovation ecosystem unique, and 2) providing lessons that can be derived from those insights that may be useful for further developing Texas's own ecosystem. This was the fireside chat between Guy Hilton , General Manager of Start-up Nation Central , and Dr. Claire Aldridge , Associate Vice President of Commercialization and Business Development at UT Southwestern (who, in t