Eureka: My personal vision for Israeli exports
Precision agriculture, water conservation management, health research and management, automated machines and cyber security and defense are the new Israeli exports. I can see a bright future for such exports, but here are my two and a half cents on how we can do a better job at exporting our technology innovation.
Precision agriculture
Having lived in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world, to export precision agriculture you would need to export it to countries that have a culture of precision. Asian farmers or African farmers tend not to have that culture of precision. They often spent very few years in school, there are no watches in their house, a lot of times they don't have electricity in their villages, they don't have television, and there are few tools or items that they master with precision.
To have a culture of precision you would need a culture of time and space, yet those very societies don't really have a culture of time and space. But what is the feature of tribal societies that might help us win contracts? They have a culture of imitation. That is if we can send our people to those villages, learn the local language, start a precision farm with locals using tacit verbal agreements, succeed at getting the farm to grow crops over a couple of years, you will then have local farmers start imitating the successful farm and start demanding some of that precision agriculture technology. Without the example of a successful farm, you will have farmers be very suspicious of farming technology such as precision irrigation or precision seed planting or precision harvesting.
Water conservation management
I remember going to a remote African farm with a group of friends and we had taken several gifts with us. We brought things like soap, shampoo, hair conditioner, perfume, tooth paste and tooth brushes, and we had no idea the African farmers would view such products with so much novelty. No one knew how to use a tooth brush and you had children playing with tooth brushes and breaking them the very first day. Some thought shampoo was some kind of detergent and started cleaning the floor with it.
So how do you teach water conversation management to a group of people accustomed to receiving free water, using it all, and praying they will receive more free water. Again tribal societies learn by imitation. We send out a local who immerses his or herself within the community, teaches one family how to conserve water, then other people will eventually start imitating such water management techniques.
Furthermore, one of the problems with water is not just desalination, a lot of the water has problems with all kinds of pollution. So when bringing in water desalination machines, they would also need to boil and filter the water. In capitalist societies we tend to try to keep our water clean because water ownership tends to be private and if someone pollutes the water we take them to court. But in tribal or militarized societies, you can't take those who pollute your water to court.
Health research and management
Again, we in free societies tend to go to doctors every now and then and do something called preventative medicine, but the culture is not very common on many countries around the world. In fact few countries have active medical systems or take their medical arsenals seriously. In most countries, you only see a doctor if you break a bone or can't get out of bed.
So how to you promote a culture of health awareness? They say doctors are something for rich people, so we would need to target the national elites of each country when promoting medical innovation. It's the generals and the CEOs and the high-ranking political officials who tend to go to doctors, the average citizen can't afford to and it is socially taboo to see a doctor in many communities.
Automated machines
I can imagine a handsome young man who graduated from a North American or European university drive a driverless car, or a city like Paris or New York city have driverless busses, or fortune 500 companies use automated machinery, but I don't really see the average John Doe being able to handle a driverless car, probably because there are too many buttons to press for him or her to understand how to operate the vehicle.
A French supermarket once came up with these automatic cashiers in 2004, I used them once, it took me forever to press the right buttons, the queue behind me was getting anxious and irritated, and that was the last time I used an automatic cashier. So the idea for automated machines would be to test them at the local level before going global. Israel has plenty of small decent towns and small but decent businesses that could test the machinery, and if that works, people will start asking for the technology and imitating the model. Smartphones used to be a drag, but then Apple targeted college students to test them first, and by the time college students learned and mastered how to use them, they pretty much convinced everyone else to buy a smartphone.
Cyber security and defense
Finally, most countries don't feel the need to backup their databases, even when they really should. Kind of like societies where you only see a doctor if you're stuck in bed or break a bone, most societies don't ask for cyber security unless a data breach really shakes things up.
Cyber security kind of works like seat belts in cars. You have careful drivers, and you have reckless drivers. Careful drivers drive carefully but also take extra precautions by wearing seat belts. Reckless drivers drive recklessly and don't see the point is wearing seat belts. So the idea is to work with those who are careful and want to take extra precautions. Those who are reckless, well let them be reckless.