Washington, D.C. – The United States-Israel Science and Technology Foundation (USISTF), a Washington-based non-profit organization that promotes mutually beneficial business collaboration between the US and Israel for the advancement of science and technology, today announced that it has entered into strategic partnership with the Israel Venture Network (IVN), a philanthropy network dedicated to promoting sustainable social change and environmental protection in Israel.

While both organizations will preserve functional autonomy, they will join forces to mount their successes in advancing the goals outlined in the USISTF visionary publication: Israel 2028: Vision and Strategy.  Israel 2028: Vision and Strategy is a roadmap outlining specific recommendations to address broad societal and economic challenges in Israel. These challenges range from ensuring environmental sustainability in growth, leveraging Israel’s strengths in high tech research and development to labor policy and education issues with the final goal of advancing Israel’s overall competitiveness and economic strength to join the top 20 most competitive countries in the World Economic Forum index.

Eric Benhamou, former chairman of 3Com Corporation and chairman of the board of directors of IVN, will advise the strategic direction of the newly formed collaborative to foster technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs that have measurable impact on both countries’ scientific and technology communities, federal and local governments, and academia.
“In the era of globalization, the strongest driver of scientific discoveries and high-tech R&D is multi-national collaboration between knowledge-based industries,” said Eric Benhamou.“USISTF and IVN have an impressive track record of strengthening the U.S. and Israel economic relationship and I am confident that through close collaboration we will be a catalyst for growing multi-national economic collaboration.”

“Joining forces with IVN will help us create a broader and more integrated approach to advancing tomorrow’s technologies,” said Ann Liebschutz, executive director of USISTF. “We are looking forward to bringing together our organizational resources and industry expertise to increase our footprint in sparkling and facilitating global business collaboration.”