By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

With much fanfare, Haifa’s director-general arrived in Dayton in September 2009 and signed a memo of understanding with Montgomery County, Dayton Development Coalition and the City of Dayton to expand economic, business and research collaboration, including the opening of a Dayton region trade office in Haifa.

Private donors from the Dayton area had raised $350,000 to fully fund the trade office in Israel for three years.

The initiative came about a year after 23 local government and business leaders participated on a trade mission to Israel.

By spring 2010, the Dayton Development Coalition and the Municipality of Haifa had hired Israeli Uri Attir as the business development director in Israel for the Dayton Region Israel Trade Alliance.

Attir had previously managed five high-tech start-ups and worked for several years with the Binational U.S.-Israel R&D Fund.

In addition to Ohio’s trade office staffed by Rick Schottenstein, Attir’s office would be the only one for an individual region in Ohio. The office would also represent the only formal trade relationship the Dayton area has with a foreign country.

With the aim of expanding partnerships among tech and aerospace businesses in the Dayton area and Haifa region — Israel’s tech capital — Attir talked about securing roughly a business partnership each month.

Some early successes materialized even before Attir was hired. In March 2009, Tel Aviv’s Tidex Systems, the University of Dayton’s Institute for the Development of Commercialization of Advanced Sensor Technology (IDCAST), and Woolpert formed a new company in Dayton, i23D, to develop applications for 3D technology that Tidex creates.

And in August 2009, Dayton-based STAN solutions, in partnership with IDCAST, entered an agreement with Adaptive Imaging Technologies of Haifa to acquire the North American distribution rights for a high-resolution, panoramic camera produced by Adaptive. STAN Solutions President Tony Manuel participated on the 2008 trade mission to Israel.

But during Attir’s three-year contract with the Dayton Development Coalition and the Municipality of Haifa, he only secured two formal business relationships: with Elbit Systems, which hired and placed a business development manager in Dayton, and with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, in a partnership with Electronic Warfare Associates’ Beavercreek office. The alliance didn’t renew Attir’s contract when it expired in March.

Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley, who has played a key role in the initiative since its inception — said he isn’t giving up.

“We’re going to keep pushing it,” he said, during an interview with The Observer after his return from the Dayton Region Israel Trade Alliance Business Development Mission, Oct. 19-26.

This was the region’s fourth trade mission to Israel since 2008. The alliance contracted Hadas Bar-Or, former trade and investment representative to Israel for Massachusetts, to coordinate the latest trip.

“At this point, we don’t have a contract with anybody long-term but I think that we need to continue to have a consistent presence (in Israel) because it’s hard to do business by phone and by email,” Foley said.

“The real challenge that we’re sorting through,” Montgomery County Administrator Joe Tuss added, “is how do you actually do that? What’s the best way to do that, and what is it that you actually want an individual in Israel to do?”

The nine participants on the mission — including Bar-Or and Schottenstein — met with more than 20 companies that fit what Foley describes as the Dayton region’s sweet spots: aerospace, sensors, and composites.

The Dayton delegation’s visits included meetings with representatives of Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit Systems.

“We met with IAI and Elbit about the UAS capabilities,” Foley said. “Sinclair is working really hard on identifying some partners in Israel to work on this.”

Sinclair Community College hopes to become an umbrella organization for national certification and training for unmanned aircraft systems.
Foley added that Elbit’s one employee in Dayton has enabled the alliance to engage further with the Haifa company.

“They showed us a product — about a month ago we pulled in a bunch of local police departments and homeland security folks,” Foley said. “They have this night vision camera that they are really hoping to get into the market for U.S. distribution channels, and we pulled together a bunch of people just to help them show it off. Basically it allows you to see very clearly at night.”

IDCAST Executive Director Larrell Walters said that following his meeting with Tiltan Systems Engineering, Tiltan’s CEO, Arie Shafir, was “ecstatic about the idea of putting people in Dayton.” Tiltan works with Woolpert in Greene County.

Walters said the trade alliance timed this mission so that participants could attend the Israel 2013 Water Technology and Environment Control Exhibition and Conference in Tel Aviv.

Among the thousands of WATEC attendees was Tammi Clements, Dayton’s water director.

Walters, who has visited Israel six times since 2008 to foster trade partnerships, described the October mission as the most productive one so far in terms of the opportunities he hopes will come out of it.

“On this trip we went in with over 20 meetings, and every one of those companies knew what was in it for them,” he said. “It was almost like they were trying to sell us as much as we were trying to sell them if not more. I know we don’t have anything yet, but I think we can come away with at least three or four really good opportunities here where I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have a couple things here within six months.”

Tuss, who has also worked on the project since its beginnings, said the next step over the coming six to nine months is for Dayton area stakeholders to get the Israelis they’ve met with to visit Dayton.

“When they travel and come to the states, part of building that relationship is where we are one of their stops,” Tuss said. “And if we’re one of their stops, usually something good happens. We will send out a number of invitations to folks to come this spring when the next Ohio UAS conference is here. Larrell will be inviting some companies to come to the sensor summit. Actually, we just had a company that was here while these guys were in Israel.”

“We can’t claim at this point to have any major home-run job creation out of this,” Foley said, “but we have worked as hard or harder than any community to build the relationships and we’re going to continue to do it because every time we go — we see it — we think there are two-way opportunities for those companies to come here and to get access to our markets.”

To view the print version of the December 2013 Observer, click here.