Experts discussed the future of technological innovation as it pertains to the economy, philanthropy, health and daily life during the penultimate panel of the Jerusalem Post London Conference.
The panel began as Daniel Kessler, Chairman of UK-Israel business, elaborated on the joint business model developed between Israel and the UK, in light of the expected bilateral trade agreement later this year.
“Israel, as everyone knows, is the start-up nation with all the r&d capabilities it has; and often you see the UK is that testbed, particularly for tech, and often as a springboard to the US and other English-speaking markets,” he said. “What we’ve seen is the r&d happening in Israel, and then the commercialization happening here [in the UK].”
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Daniel Korski, CEO and founder of Public and former adviser to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron, added to this point, stating that “on the one hand, we’ve got real support from the government and ecosystems on both sides; investors, entrepreneurs, who want to make things work. At the same time, we’ve got to just be sanguine about forces of obstruction that have another agenda and how important it is to kind of show that agenda leads nowhere.”
Dr. Merav Galili, founding CEO of the Menomadin Foundation, then explained her foundation’s interest in finding innovative ways to fund humanitarian efforts: “We understand that philanthropy is not the answer to the world’s problems. If you look at America’s GDP, we see that money channeled towards philanthropic causes didn’t even top 2% in the past few years; we need private investors, but we know that private investors are reluctant to pursue risk,” she said.
She added: “We have to think of ways to create an ‘innovative risk mitigation paradigm’: using philanthropic funds as cushions to private capital. We use philanthropic money in order to do the business development — the risk mitigation — in order to develop the concept and only then we will ask private capital to join us.”
Yaniv Amir, president of Essence USA, shared his insight on the future of the medtech industry: “In essence, we’ve see a big change in the trend in healthcare. COVID obviously accelerated things in the market,” he said, explaining that medical visits via video conferencing were one of many innovations that are likely to stick around after the pandemic.
“People are living longer. There are not enough doctors, not enough med staff, not enough beds in hospitals. And you need some solution for that. The only way is technology. And we believe that remote patient monitoring is the way forward. And we definitely see that trajectory in the future.”
The panel ended with a discussion of the future of technology as it pertains to our everyday lives, with technological convergence bringing more and more innovative apps into the fold. “All this stuff is becoming available and new things are possible, but it requires a level of education by the consumer, as well as the regulator and the government,” said Korski.