Israel, India Sign MoU to Collaborate in Tech Innovation

An agreement was signed on Tuesday between Israel's Start-Up Nation Central and India's International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology (iCreate) to initiate a bilateral program to accelerate innovation and technology cooperation.

In a statement, the Israeli embassy said the aim of this program is to bring together Israeli and Indian entrepreneurs and start-ups to collaborate on innovative projects. The MoU was signed by Eugene Kandel, CEO of Start-Up Nation Central from Jerusalem and Anupam Jalote, CEO of iCreate from Ahmedabad. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to the government and Sanjeev Kumar Singla, India's Ambassador to Israel were present at the event through video-conferencing, while Ron Malka, Israel's Ambassador to India and Yaakov Finkelstein, Israel's Consul General in Mumbai were physically present, the statement said. This agreement is an important milestone in the growing innovation collaboration between Israel and India and stands in line with the visions of the Prime Ministers. Israel has the most start-ups per capita worldwide, and India is the top innovation destination in Asia," Malka said.

"Together, both countries continue to form partnerships and collaborations in technology and innovation to solve a range of global issues like Covid-19, renewable energy and more, implementing high end technologies like AI, big data analysis and more, Malka said. iCreate and Start-Up Nation Central will initiate a unique Online Acceleration Program for market penetration to work with relevant technologies that match up with requirements originating from Indian corporations, it said.

The program will begin by defining a set of challenges that will then be shortlisted to the most relevant solutions and technology providers. This will be followed by a matchmaking mechanism that will be developed by leveraging both countries' networks to support the process of adaptation and piloting these solutions in India, the statement added. The Israel-India growing partnership has developed into a strategic partnership in recent years, and since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the two countries have collaborated on a number of joint ventures such as Operation Open Skies and integration of Israeli medical equipment and technologies in Indian hospitals.