Over the past ten years, Israel has succeeded in effectively exploiting its main natural resource: High quality Human Resources.
Israel has become world renowned for its Hi-Tech industry, due to its excellent engineers, high quality and level of research and its significant scientific achievments.
It is the vocation and the purpose of the Ministry of Science and Technology to support scientific research programs that will enable new generations of technologies.
The infrastructure program's objective is to utilize the existing potential within universities and in various researchers to the fullest, in order to develop knowledge fields that have an added value for the State of Israel, and which hold a future economic potential. This program focuses on seeing the whole picture, and was the first to focus on calls for proposals which were directed towards inter-university and interdisciplinary research. The program's objective is to utilizeIsrael's researcher's superb capabilities in order to advance the research another step towards turning it into applied research and allowing it to adapt to the industry's needs, which yearns for this kind of knowledge in order to turn it into a commercial advantage. Furthermore, the program is designed to guide exceptional scientists towards achieving the national goals, in accordance with the National Infrastructure Committee's definitions. Among the fields in which scientists are encouraged to put their effort are: Electro-optics, Information and Computer Sciences, Microelectronics, Advanced Materials, Bio-Medical Engineering , Water, Biotechnology and more.
It should be noted that the "graduates" of these programs eventually become the leading force of the high-tech industry developed in Israel.
From existing data (research conducted at 2002) it appears that in the electro-optics field alone, in which the Ministry has invested about 100 million NIS in research and inter-university and interdisciplinary co-operations, 70 start-up companies were created, 30 of which survived. This industry alone has brought over a billion dollars of investment money to Israel.