Mandatory military service, according to Dan Senor and Saul Singer, authors of Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (2009), an observation that seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. After all, people serving in active and reserve military units aren’t in school learning new skills or working in laboratories inventing new things. But the conventional wisdom overlooks a few things, at least when it comes to Israel
First, the Israeli military isn’t a strictly top-down, command and control organization. Junior officers get little guidance from the top and “are expected to improvise, even if it means breaking some rules.” “High school stand-outs are recruited into elite military units and trained intensively, with an emphasis on technology.” In other words, the Israeli armed forces encouraged critical thinking.
The training and the contacts do not end when people complete active duty. Israeli’s mandatory military service also requires them to spend several weeks a year in the reserves, a time during which they renew contacts or establish new ones, thus creating or expanding social networks for potential innovators and entrepreneurs. This, coupled with Israeli’s relative small size and population, creates a condition where everyone knows everyone, at least casually.
Consequently, when someone serves in the reserves, “everything required to launch a start-up ‘will be a phone call away…Almost everyone can find some connection to whomever he or she needs to contact to get started.’”
Okay, but what does this mean for public policy? Should we require everyone to serve in the reserves? No. Here’s what it means: innovation takes more than new research facilities, venture capital funds, and tax credits for start-up investments. Innovation also depends on many intangible, unquantifiable factors, like the extent to which people with ideas, money, and entrepreneurial spirit bump into each other. Does public policy facilitate or inhibit those “collisions”?
