Long before people rattled off terms like startup or Internet, Uzia Galil had a vision for the role that knowledge-based businesses could play in building up the young state of Israel.

Galil had fled the Nazi takeover of his native Romania and arrived alone in British-run Palestine as a teenager in 1941. He had hoped to become a doctor but was placed in a farm training program. “I saw I had two alternatives – one was agriculture, and I had no attraction to agriculture, so I decided to study engineering,” he said.

Galil maneuvered his way into a technical school in Tel Aviv, sold his only possession from home – a Leica camera – to pay for university preparatory classes, and in 1943 enrolled in Technion in electrical engineering. After the War of Independence, he worked in communications in the Israeli navy, which gave him an opportunity to do post-graduate studies at Purdue University in Indiana.

Galil’s eyes were opened. Working at Purdue and then at Motorola, he saw how universities, government and business could collaborate for mutual gain. He witnessed the first industrial parks and early technology corridors like Route 128 outside Boston. And he realized he needed to bring those ideas home to Israel.

“In Israel we had research in the Ministry of Defense that was very good and research in the university that was very good, but they wouldn’t talk to each other,” Galil recalled. “What I saw in the U.S. was totally different — how the military gave work to the university, and part of their knowledge came from that collaboration. At Route 128, I saw what it meant when MIT started new companies. I said, ‘When I go back, it is essential that I bring this message and try to implement it.’ ”

Upon his return, Galil taught at Technion and started a small electronics business called Elron. He had to buck the prevailing ethos that foreign-made technology was superior to anything that could be produced in Israel. But gradually – assisted by Technion aeronautics professor Moshe Arens, who later became Foreign Minister and Defense Minister – he started attracting outside investors.             When France imposed a potentially crippling arms embargo after the 1967 war, Elron was ready to help fill the gap in military production. Gradually it grew into a large holding company with global sales and international partners such as Monsanto, Scientific Data Systems, and Control Data Corp.

A spin-off from Elron – Elbit Systems – built one of the earliest microcomputers. In 1972 another spin-off – Elscint, which produced medical devices – became the first Israeli firm to be traded on Wall Street. Along the way, Galil convinced Haifa’s mayor to open the country’s first industrial park, which today is the flourishing Matam Scientific Industries Center, home to R&D offices of Intel, Yahoo!, Google, Philips and Microsoft.

With fifty years under its belt and scores of spin-offs numbering tens of thousands of employees, Elron has been one of the pillars of the Israeli economy and its high-tech “miracle.” And Technion graduates were key to its success – not just as engineers but as managers and executives.

“If you look at our companies – the engineering teams, the software people – the majority are Technion graduates,” Galil said. “That was key and still is today. If you look at Elbit, or when we established Elscint, the majority of the people came from Technion. Many of them became managers…. And hundreds of companies grew from people who left Elron.”