Innovation in Canada and Israel: An Intern’s Comparison
To be entirely candid, my application for TD Lab was the third time in my life I applied to work for TD.
In high school, I had a passion for the banking industry, and an adherence to customer satisfaction, so a Bank teller position was of obvious interest.
First Application:
16-year old Ryan, eager to dive into his professional career, earning part-time pay to buy the next Xbox release, was let down from not being old enough to be a teller.
Second Application:
This time it was the summer before starting my degree at Wilfrid Laurier University. Being of age now, I thought I would try again to work as a teller. Unfortunately, the branch closest to me was not hiring at the time. Being from a smaller city, I expected this.
Third Application:
Success! Echoing the quote from Shakespeare, “third time’s the charm”. This time, however, in a different role as a business analyst with one of the bank’s innovation teams — TD Lab. Here I can combine my business acumen from university and my tech industry roots from my involvement with Communitech.
Lab life
While being both excited and nervous to start my business analyst role at TD Lab, there was another element to my summer that I had to look forward to. I was fortunate enough to be one of 17 Wilfrid Laurier University students who were given a scholarship from the Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman Foundation to go to Israel, and gain exposure to their world-renowned entrepreneurship eco-system.
This entrepreneurship course sent 23 students in total (17 Laurier & six IDC Herzliya, one of Israel’s leading academic institutions) to Waterloo, Niagara, Toronto, and Israel to explore the local start-up ecosystem and compete in business cases to cultivate our entrepreneurial thinking.
Understanding that this course would challenge me to apply entrepreneurial ideologies, I set forth a goal to gather three key lessons about the Canadian entrepreneurial methodology and apply it within Israel and compare the differences.
Working with the brilliant team at TD Lab, the three lessons and ideologies I took from my internship there were:
- Empathy with innovation; build for impact, not just a shiny product.
Every project we worked on during my time at the lab had a purpose to provide customers, specifically students, with a better overall experience. Being able to relate to the end user, it challenged me to think critically about how our projects would actually improve the lives of students, rather than just adding new features that might go unnoticed. Having a customer-first mindset introduced me to a type of thinking that would propel me further in my entrepreneurial goals.
2. Innovation can’t happen without change
Stemming off lesson #1, building solutions that create an impact on the student population required a fresh approach. We examined today’s student experience and through research, interviews, and testing, determined key areas to explore that would address unmet needs. Focusing exclusively on how to improve the customer experience, provided a clear vision on what we needed to break down and remodel, in order to create meaningful interactions.
3. Reflect and collaborate while focusing on the overarching goal
During my internship at TD Lab, this lesson was reaffirmed to me with a quote from Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less:
“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
What the book spoke to, is that most companies struggle to effectively align with their overarching goals to ensure efficient and high-quality output. While working on projects within the Lab team, I was consistently challenged with the question of “But, why?”. The purpose of this question was to prioritize reflection in my work, ensuring that it met the goal of putting the customer first.
Using these lessons as a foundation for Israel, I left my internship at TD Lab with authentic knowledge about what it means to truly be part of an innovation team.
Israel’s ideologies of entrepreneurialism
The syllabus for the Israel entrepreneurship exchange course presented us with The Big Question:
“How is it that Israel — a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old…in a constant state of turmoil since its founding, with no natural resources — produces more [innovation] than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK?” (quoted from Start-Up Nation).
To help us answer this question, while building our global entrepreneurial acumen, we partook in a combination of site tours, live case study reviews, and academic readings. With the pace and intensity of the course, I was quickly able to develop a personal comparison between entrepreneurship in Canada to Israel.
A key driver in this development was our first visit in Israel, The Peres Centre for Peace and Innovation. This visit reinforced why entrepreneurship and innovation isn’t just a buzzword in Israel, it’s engrained in their culture and history.
The Peres Centre for Peace and Innovation itself is a physical journal, encompassing the history of high-tech Israeli startups and their founders. Shimon Peres, former Prime Minister of Israel, understood that if the past was not recorded and reflected on, then it would be lost. For Israel, and any business really, forgetting your past and not recognizing your trials and tribulations can be detrimental to your future successes.
Being exposed to what makes Israel a start-up nation, I took note of the three ideologies highlighted at the Peres Centre:
- Confidence to challenge the status-quo — “Chutzpah”
“Optimists and pessimists die the exact same death, but they live very different lives” — Shimon Peres
Chutzpah [huts • puh] is frequently mentioned within other articles and books outlining Israel’s unique history. The word, although there is no direct translation, loosely translates to shameless audacity. It is the personality trait to consistently be assertive and determined, with the purpose of achieving results quickly. This mindset to challenge the status quo unsurprisingly stems from Israel’s mandatory military service where results mean the safety of citizens. They learn the importance of hard work and doing whatever needs to be done to succeed.
2. Fail fast and fail early
In Israel, failure is encouraged because it teaches what an entrepreneur needs to succeed. Every time failure was mentioned, it was at the beginning of the entrepreneur’s success. In fact, it was mentioned that some venture capital firms in Israel won’t consider funding an entrepreneur if they haven’t failed yet. Failure forces the entrepreneur to challenge themselves, pivot, restart, and most importantly, learn. Only through failure can an entrepreneur learn the skills necessary to thrive in entrepreneurship.
3. There’s no better time than the present.
Failure, coupled with the lesson that it’s never too late to start, is my current recipe for success as an entrepreneur. Without starting you cannot fail and without failure, you cannot learn.
Prior to the trip, the book Start-Up Nation placed a lot of emphasis on the technology successes in Israel but overshadowed the most important aspect — the people. The Israeli students that accompanied us on the trip truly embodied the ideologies mentioned above and provided mentorship that will never be forgotten. These lessons left me excited to come back to Canada and further my career in entrepreneurship and technology sectors.
I believe Canada will continue to solidify itself as a global leader in innovation. Being in Tel Aviv and experiencing the atmosphere, it felt extremely similar to the Kitchener-Waterloo Region with just slightly different goals and habits. After immersing myself in both entrepreneurial ecosystems, I am returning to Canada with an entirely new level of confidence.
