Taiwanese start-ups can look to their Israeli counterparts for inspiration to gain international significance, Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) chairman James Huang (黃志芳) said yesterday at InnoVEX — a special Computex Taipei section devoted to innovation and start-ups.
“Our start-ups have narrow mindsets, they lack a global perspective,” Huang told the Taipei Times, adding that emerging Taiwanese entrepreneurs often design products with only the domestic market in mind, while Israeli start-ups design products for the world.
Local start-ups also often face financial difficulties, he said.
“Taiwan’s VC [venture capital] scale has dramatically shrunk in the past 20 years due to changes in the ecosystem,” Huang said, adding that good start-ups are in desperate need of international funding.
Local start-ups are often short of good marketing strategies, which their Israeli counterparts excel at, he said.
“They know how to tell stories” about their products, he said.
While Israel has the highest number of start-ups per capita in the world, the nation faces challenges transforming into a scale-up nation, said Denes Ban, a managing partner at OurCrowd, during a panel discussion led by Huang.
“There are many similarities between Israel and Taiwan, but our economies are different,” Israeli Representative to Taiwan Asher Yarden said, adding that the manufacturing industry in Israel is not on the same scale as Taiwan’s.
This leads to Israeli start-ups exiting the market prematurely as they sell themselves to bigger companies, Yarden said, citing Mobileye NV’s 2017 sale to Intel Corp.
“Israel is very strong in the ‘R’ part of R&D [research and development], while Taiwan is strong in the ‘D’ part,” Ban said, adding that both nations should leverage their advantages through further exchanges.
“Taiwan and Israel’s business models should be complementary,” Huang said, adding that Taiwan could serve as a manufacturing base for Israeli start-ups, while local start-ups could assimilate business models from their counterparts in the Middle East.
TAITRA this year set up an office in Tel-Aviv to boost business collaborations, he said.
The cultural aspect might also play an important part in the way start-ups from both nations behave, Yarden said.
“We’re not afraid of failure,” he said, adding that Taiwanese start-ups are often less willing to take risks.
The overall business atmosphere in Israel is much less formal and this encourages innovation and exchanges, which are essential to the survival of start-ups, Yarden said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
TAIWAN VALUE CHAIN: Foxtron is to fully own Luxgen following the transaction and it plans to launch a new electric model, the Foxtron Bria, in Taiwan next year Yulon Motor Co (裕隆汽車) yesterday said that its board of directors approved the disposal of its electric vehicle (EV) unit, Luxgen Motor Co (納智捷汽車), to Foxtron Vehicle Technologies Co (鴻華先進) for NT$787.6 million (US$24.98 million). Foxtron, a half-half joint venture between Yulon affiliate Hua-Chuang Automobile Information Technical Center Co (華創車電) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), expects to wrap up the deal in the first quarter of next year. Foxtron would fully own Luxgen following the transaction, including five car distributing companies, outlets and all employees. The deal is subject to the approval of the Fair Trade Commission, Foxtron said. “Foxtron will be
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
RSS