Israel Innovation Impact Series (i3)

The Israel Innovation Impact Series, known as i3, was the Chamber's briefing format: a session taking Israeli capability in one specific field to one specific audience, usually in partnership with an institution that had a direct interest in it.

The Format

Where the Business Exchange brought a cohort of companies to a market, i3 worked the other way round — it took a subject to a room. A typical session paired a technical presentation on what Israeli companies and research institutions were doing in a field with an analytical account of why, and what it meant for organisations in the region. Recorded subjects include business analytics and social media measurement, cybersecurity initiatives, big data technology, and the state-level collaborations described below.

The audiences were correspondingly specific: a university research office, a state economic development agency, a hospital system, a corporate technology function. The point was less to sell than to establish that a serious body of relevant work existed, from which partnerships might follow.

The South Carolina-Israel Collaboration

The most substantial thing to come out of this strand of the Chamber's work was in South Carolina. The Collaboration was a major initiative of the state's research universities, industries and economic development agencies together with the Israeli government, organised by the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Southeast Region with grant support from a Charleston-based industrial group.

It was a genuine multi-party programme rather than an event series. It produced joint research and development awards made together with the Israeli Chief Scientist's office, university-level research partnerships, and a recurring calendar of visits in both directions — including a South Carolina Israel Experience day held in Columbia in 2012 and business and research missions travelling in the other direction. The Chamber treated it as a template for what a state-level relationship could look like when the universities, the industry and both governments were in the same programme.

Why State-Level Work Mattered

The Chamber's territory covered six states, and only one of them contained its headquarters. Left to itself, an Atlanta-based organisation would have concentrated almost all its activity in Georgia. Programmes like the South Carolina Collaboration were how it avoided that — by building a durable institutional relationship in a state rather than visiting it occasionally.

The pattern recurs elsewhere in the archive: an Israeli logistics delegation to Memphis, research partnerships with medical institutions in Charleston, a manufacturing investment in Alabama, a governor's trade delegation to Israel. The state-by-state picture is summarised under Israeli companies in the Southeast.

Binational Research Funding

Much of the research-side activity in this strand connected to the binational funding infrastructure that exists between the two countries — most prominently the BIRD Foundation, which has funded joint US-Israeli industrial research and development projects since 1977 and whose calls for proposals appeared regularly in the Chamber's news. Briefing members on those programmes, and on how a US company partners with an Israeli one to apply, was a standing part of the i3 remit.

The rest of the programme is on the events calendar; news coverage of individual sessions is summarised under publications.

Why Briefings Rather Than Matchmaking

The i3 series filled a gap the Chamber's other formats could not. A Business Exchange requires a market that already knows it wants something: buyers must be willing to clear a day for pre-arranged meetings, which means they must already accept the premise that Israeli suppliers in their category are worth meeting.

In a new sector, or a new state, or a new institution, that premise has not yet been established. A briefing establishes it. It costs the audience an hour rather than a day, it makes no demand on them beyond attention, and its purpose is simply to demonstrate that a serious body of relevant work exists. Matchmaking can follow later, once the audience has decided the subject is real.

The Institutional Route

The other distinctive feature of this strand is that it worked through institutions rather than individual companies. A university research office, a state agency or a hospital system moves slowly, but when it does move it brings a great deal with it — funding, facilities, faculty, procurement, and a durability that individual corporate relationships rarely have.

The South Carolina programme is the clearest illustration. It took years to assemble and involved universities, industry, a state's economic development machinery and a national government, but what it produced — joint research awards, standing partnerships, a recurring calendar — outlasted any single company relationship the Chamber brokered. For an organisation with a small staff and a six-state territory, that leverage was the whole point.