Want more start-ups and patents? Encourage chutzpah in students — the confidence to interrupt lectures with questions.
“In many cultures, teachers teach and students repeat what they learn, but in the Israeli culture — and it goes back hundreds of years — asking is part of the learning,” said Menahem Ben-Sasson, president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
What he called the “inquisitive method of learning” was one element explaining Israel’s remarkable success in innovation.
Professor Ben-Sasson — whose university accounts for eight Nobel prize winners, 9300 patents and 110 spin-off companies — was at the University of Sydney this week for a joint workshop on the commercialisation of science.
Read the full article by Bernard Lane at The Australian (subscription only).