Last month, Gemini’s founder and Chairman, Ed Mlavsky, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Israel Management Center (IMC) in honor of the critical role he has played in building the Israeli hi-tech and venture capital sectors. The IMC cited his work at Gemini, Israel’s first VC fund, and, prior to that, as the Executive Director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research & Development (BIRD) Foundation from 1979-1992.

BIRD was established in 1977 and provides government funding for joint projects between US and Israeli companies. With very few other sources of financing available until the Israeli VC sector was created in the early to mid 1990s, the foundation became a vital source of capital to companies in this country and made a massive contribution to the development of the hi-tech sector.

By pairing up often tiny Israeli start-ups with large US corporations, BIRD provided the former with channels to market and the ability to learn valuable lessons from working with their much bigger partners, which on numerous occasions ended up buying their junior counterparts. Moreover, since its inception BIRD has invested over $280M in 800 schemes that have generated sales of more than $8B. The fund’s achievements led Israel to create similar programs with other countries, including South Korea, Canada and the UK.

Given BIRD’s soaring success, though, why does such a program have to exclusively involve pairing an Israeli company with a foreign one? Since numerous mid- and larger-sized Israeli technology companies now exist in a way that wasn’t the case 30 years ago, why not create an “Israel-Israel BIRD” that would match up two Israeli firms and ensure that all the benefits stay in this country?

This would include the income generated by the projects that receive grants as well as that earned should the partners merge. And any M&A would push the very important process of creating more very big Israeli companies – ie $1B+ - of which there are too few.

Despite the headline to this post, we obviously couldn’t call any such organization BIRD, because it wouldn’t be “bi-national”, although calling it the National Industrial Research & Development Foundation – or NIRD – however apposite, probably wouldn’t do either.