#ActBeyond with Jenny Havemann I Founder at GIIN

Jenny Havemann is one of those individuals who can move fluidly between different ecosystems and build bridges to foster collaboration and unleash untouched potential for growth. She immigrated to Germany with her family when she was ten years old. From an early age she devoted herself to the really big issues of our time and the German-Israeli relations. As Jenny fell in love with her husband Eliyah, she also fell in love with the world of innovation. The couple eventually moved to Israel, where Jenny fully devotes herself to raise the relationship and cooperation between Germany, Europe and Israel to a new level - whether in terms of innovations, media coverage or politics.

If you are interested in the Israeli innovation ecosystem, you can join Jenny and her team on a tech tour through the Startup Nation. Enjoy reading!

You were born in Ukraine, went to school in Germany and now live with your family in Israel. What feeling do you personally associate with change? 

As you can imagine, emigration and immigration actually have a lot to do with change. Of course, it depends on whether you emigrate out of necessity or out of own ambition. Personally, I associate change with courage and curiosity. In this, I also see the connection to the world of innovation.

Because without curiosity, no new ideas will arise - and in order to realize innovative ideas, it takes courage.

When I was 10 years old, my family decided to immigrate to Germany, more out of necessity than anything else. However, when I think back on that week, I remember very positive feelings. There has been a great curiosity about the unknown and new, although we left friends and family in Ukraine and were certainly sad about it. Emigrating to Israel wasn't really planned, but something we decided to do. I met my husband in the Jewish community in Hamburg and it was always his wish to emigrate to Israel. After our wedding it was clear to me that I would come with him!

I am certainly a courageous person by nature. Change is something that excites me. But especially with regard to my own children and parenting,

I am convinced that we can learn how to embrace change. Children can learn to be brave and agile in uncertain situations - and adults do too.

You are founder of GIIN, the German-Israeli Innovation Network. What mission do you pursue with your projects?

GIIN builds bridges between German-speaking countries and Israel. In our work, we focus on people and innovation. We mainly connect German companies with Israeli startups. German companies that come to Israel for one of our tech tours naturally want to look at the ecosystem here and are searching for inspiration. At the same time, Israeli startups are interested in the wealth of experience and knowledge about innovations from a German perspective. The mutual interest is indeed very high.

However, we also support social projects. Above all, I use my private Twitter channel and my social media presence to clearly position myself on anti-Semitism and to exchange ideas with journalists. This is how a collaboration with Dr. Susanne Glass, the former head of the ARD studio here in Israel, came about. Together we set up the Israeli-European Media Summit, which is taking place for the 2nd time this year. The summit brings together journalists, politicians, start-ups, organizations and companies from Europe and Israel to address urgent socio-political issues.

At some point I had the idea of tackling social problems the way we tackle business challenges. So, why not combine social issues with innovative practices? This is how the first nationwide hackathon against anti-Semitism came about, which is taking place for the first time this year.

In all these projects, GIIN works with many partners and sponsors who support and promote our work. This is the only way we are able to build solid bridges and sustain important conversations between countries and people.

Midmarket meets "The StartUp Nation" - at first glance, the two innovation environments seem very different. What are critical success factors for building cross-country collaborations that actually work?

Again, it all boils down to people. Of course, the prerequisite is that the underlying topic or technology at stake fits. But when sparks fly between two parties and they share the same values, both sides are inherently more willing to continue the conversation and strengthen their cooperation. In our work, we often find that physical contact makes it so much easier for people to connect and move projects forward. It just doesn't work that fast digitally.

Another critical success factor, especially in cross-border collaboration, is understanding and respecting each other's cultures. It's not just about cultural differences between a corporation and a startup, but about the German corporate culture of excellence meeting Israeli speed. Even though a direct nature of communication is what connects both business cultures, there are also significant differences. I like to use the following analogy for this phenomenon. While Israeli startups go to market with a green banana and leave it there to ripen with the customer, German companies go to market with a yellow banana. First in the market vs. best in the market - that describes the difference in mentality very well. 

With GIIN, we are at their side as translator and consultant.  

Given the current world situation and global crises, some critical investments are stopped or even pulled out of innovation projects. What conditions should be created now to further promote transnational open innovation practices - especially now?

It is actually very interesting to observe how the innovation environment is evolving within the current global crises, from Corona to the war in Ukraine to the upcoming energy crisis. I would say that investments in innovation projects are not stopped per se, but rather made more focused. In 2020 in particular, we saw everything around digital health take off in a big way. One record investment followed the next. 

Investments in Israeli Digital Health companies crossed the $1B raised in a single year threshold for the first time ever in H1/2021, surpassing the full year amounts raised by the sector in 2020 and in 2019. Source: Start-up Nation Central

And yet, startups are telling us for the first time that they're not hiring or even laying people off. The goal is to secure enough money to survive the current crisis situation. There is definitely uncertainty. And I absolutely understand! Of course, crises are associated with many uncertainties. But I also believe that acute challenges require rapid solutions and that people are willing to make the necessary investments when the time has come. Plato already knew: Necessity is the mother of invention. Right? We can see this very well in the example of Israel, where the cyber security and digital health ecosystem continues to develop strongly. I believe that we will now see exactly the same exponential upswing in the field of innovative energy and sustainability solutions, as these are probably the most critical issues of the current time.

As an international society, we need the courage not to neglect future issues and to enable long-term, strategic investments in critical innovation areas now. We can only solve tomorrow's challenges by investing in the here and now. Politically, the conditions for startups and innovation ecosystems need to be simplified, de-bureaucratized and more investments made available for female founders. In Germany in particular, far too little attention is paid to accelerators compared to Israel.

In your opinion, what are the competencies that are absolutely necessary in a healthy innovation ecosystem? 

I have already talked about courage and agility. And when we talk about agile companies or systems today, we are ultimately talking about people. It takes people who are inherently open to change. People who are open-minded, think outside the box and recognize outdated structures. In the end, it is also people who build bridges to those who have difficulties with the new. Openness to others and the freedom to try things out create the right framework in an ecosystem to enable innovation.  

In my opinion, there are three more factors that are needed to build a successful culture of innovation:

Creativity - especially in the field of education, because as they say: creativity is a muscle. So if you train this mindset and allow young people to find unconventional solutions in school, then of course a society will not be short of young adults with groundbreaking ideas.

Cooperation – Israeli startups are so successful above all, also internationally, mainly because Israel has managed to have all sectors working together. Universities, companies, venture capital, military, accelerators... all working together. Unfortunately, we are not there yet in Germany.

Investment – without money, good ideas remain on paper. In fact, we do not lack bold ideas. We lack the venture capital to explore and test these new paths.

Thank you Jenny for the interview and the valuable work in promoting international understanding and fostering the development of a shared sense of innovation!

Give this interview a thumbs up and follow Jenny on LinkedIn and Twitter for latest news about her work and the Israeli innovation ecosystem.

Relevant resources

• GIIN
• Israeli-European Media Summit
• Hackathon gegen Antisemitismus
• Jenny's personal page