Inauguration of Coller Ignite: The Entrepreneurship Club

Coller Ignite: The Coller Entrepreneurship Club at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management, was inaugurated on December 4^th at an event that took place at WeWork in Tel Aviv.  Participating in the event were young entrepreneurs starting out along their career paths, and students and alumni of various MBA programs at the Coller School of Management.

Invited guests were Dr. Iris Ginzburg, Head of the Sofaer Global MBA and the MBA in Management of Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Coller School, and Nimrod Kramer, an entrepreneur and co-founder of The Elegant Monkeys (TEM) startup, which raised millions of US dollars from the Japanese enterprise Murata Manufacturing at the beginning of 2017.  

Coller Ignite was founded with the purpose of enabling students and alumni of the Coller School of Management and Tel Aviv University as a whole to experience entrepreneurship.  The activities of the club will include events, meetings with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship workshops conducted in cooperation with the Microsoft Accelerator, and most importantly, it will participate in preparing participants for the annual Coller Startup Competition for entrepreneurs of startups at the beginning of their journey, which will take place this year for the second time.  The members of the team of students and alumni from the Coller School of Management who are leading the club are:  Donna Lev, Mark Kolodkin, Morag Edry, Maor Friedman, Simona Valsky, Tali Ellenbogen, and Mor Lubranski.

In her address to the participants, Dr. Iris Ginzburg told them about the tools and insights that would enrich their entrepreneurial thought and practice.  According to her, entrepreneurship is ingrained in the future.  Whether for the short term or the long term, every entrepreneur is driven by the goal of cracking a question that does not yet have a solution.  The entrepreneur has to be familiar with trends and directions in society, technology, economics, environment and politics, and especially growth trends, since they are the key to understanding an area of activity and those responsible for the repercussions on the activities of startups, even if they have no direct contact to the world of immediate content.

Dr. Ginzburg noted that in recent years organizations and corporations have been following an openness to innovation approach and are prepared to adopt and institute startup ideas, and in the opposite direction they are beginning to offer the market directions and solutions that have not yet matured, so that they will continue to develop.  Today, there is more openness to dialog and ideas, and there are even employees dedicated to the notion in the large companies, which opens many possibilities to entrepreneurs.

The 26-year-old entrepreneur Nimrod Kramer told participants about the innovative social network startup that he founded five years previously together with a group of friends.  At first it was a success but then problems started to set in that led them to decide to change direction.  So, the group of entrepreneurs that founded The Elegant Monkeys is today leading a startup that deals with translating human emotions and mental states like stress into the digital dimension. 

Kramer, who delivered a lecture titled “Falling in Love with the Problem,” believes that many entrepreneurs are oriented to thinking in terms of a solution and essentially fall in love with the solution before they have even begun to define the root of the problem.  Understanding the main problem is, in his opinion, the key to success, because if the entrepreneurs do not identify the main problem they can miss out on the whole process of developing a solution, choosing the best market and crystallizing an appropriate strategy.

Kramer related how after the first startup failed the entrepreneurs decided to make an in-depth study of the reasons for success and failure, and met with dozens of entrepreneurs who helped them to understand the processes of entrepreneurship and the mistakes that entrepreneurs commonly make.  In conclusion, Kramer said that you have to choose the right path and not the easy one, even if it is difficult and takes more time.  And as an example he gave the long process of 15 months or so that he and his group went through with the Japanese investor he got to know within the framework of the Hackathon of Murata Manufacturing in Israel before they signed the investment agreement.  This investment is enabling them to enter the organizational healthcare market in Japan, by developing means to measure physiological and mental states of employees like stress, burnout and more.

For photos from the event and more information about Coller Ignite, visit their Facebook page.

Coller Ignite is opened to all Coller School of Management and Tel Aviv University students and alumni. To join the club, click here.