Business plan to boost IDF enlistment wins young entrepreneurship award

Noah Shemesh-Mandelzweig and Lior Mandelzweig, behind table, take first place in the Business Plan Writing Contest "From Idea to Enterprise"

BEER-SHEVA, Israel (Press Release) — At a recent Young Entrepreneurship in the Negev conference, three projects were announced as winners in this year’s competition “Business Writing Plan – From Idea to Enterprise” sponsored by the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship and Hi-Tech Management.

Noah Shemesh-Mandelzweig and Lior Mandelzweig, both Industrial Engineers, and Master’s students in the Department of Business Administration in the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, have been married for three years and are the parents of six-month old Yoavi.

During their honeymoon in Thailand, where they heard a chance conversation between a group of young people before army enlistment, they had an idea. In light of the continuous fall in the percentage of young people enlisting in the Israeli Army and the increase in the phenomenon of evasion and refusal to follow orders, they decided that they would like to make a plan with the intention of deepening the feeling of belonging to the country and raising the level of motivation for significant and important service in the IDF.

After a long process consolidating the idea, testing the software and writing a business plan with the help of the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship and Hi-Tech Management, their initiative Battle Heritage Project was born, a social-educational project which offers a unique docu-theater experience that describes the development of historical events leading to the establishment of the State of Israel and analyzing of questions of moral and ethical standards since its establishment.

Noah and Lior took first place in the Business Plan Writing Contest “From Idea to Enterprise” with the Battle Heritage Project which supports educating Jewish teens in Zionist principles and love of the homeland.

The three winners in the competition were as follows:

·         First place: the Battle Heritage Project

·         Second place: Zohar THz, a camera that creates a three-dimensional image which “sees” through clothes, plaster walls, envelopes and more.

·         Third place: Prosthesis Dynamic Solutions, which has developed a unique and innovative device for preventing the phenomenon of knee-collapse in leg amputees.

The conference featured a lecture by Dr. Dov Frohman, the founding CEO of Intel-Israel, and a panel on “Chances, Risks and the Challenges Facing the New Entrepreneur.” As part of the day several events were held to encourage young entrepreneurship of students and young entrepreneurs from Southern Israel, including a bazaar selling products by young entrepreneurs from Southern Israel and entrepreneurship information booths.

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Preceding provided by American Associates,  Ben Gurion University of the Negev