Israel’s higher education institutions, particularly the Technion, the prestigious technological university in the northern city of Haifa, must take a large share of the credit for this creativity.

“All the groups have set up subsidiaries here because of the proximity of the talents of the Technion university where there are (people with) excellent CVs,” said Yoel Maarek, president of Yahoo Research Israel, which employs about 50 people.

“I myself have studied at the school of bridge engineering in France but when IBM hired me it was thanks to my degree from the Technion,” he said.

The huge Technion campus comprising 19 schools for 12,000 students trained 70 percent of the country’s current engineers and 80 percent of the executives of Israeli companies listed on Nasdaq.

“Many students… are already snapped up by large foreign companies,” said Ilan Marek, professor of chemistry at the Technion.

“In the early 2000s, we broke down the barriers between the four classical branches of science, allowing the students to move between fields and have a more global vision,” he said.

“The key to the development of a country is to train leaders in science.”