Can Start-Ups Move Forward Israeli/Palestinian Peace?

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A long-time professor of Entrepreneurship has an idea for how to move forward relations between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s a small step and who knows how it will go.

The professor is Ted Grossman, who in 1993 helped invent one of the signature course at Babson College — Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship (FME). Babson freshmen take this full-year course — in the Fall, students plan a business and in the spring they execute the plan.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Grossman became familiar with a summer camp in Maine called Seeds of Peace that brought young Israelis and Palestinians together for the summer in a neutral location. Seeds of Peace was a wonderful experience but once the campers returned to their homes, there was no formal contact with them and the benefits eroded.

Grossman is a fan of the 2000 movie Remember the Titans – it stars Denzel Washington and it’s about integrating a football team in Alexandria, Virginia in the 1960s. The movie captures Grossman’s thinking about the power of bringing together different people for a common purpose.

Grossman noted that as recently as December 2010, a Time magazine article highlighted that the image that most Palestinians have of Israelis is shaped by their direct contact with soldiers. And that image is not as positive as the one that those who attend Seeds of Peace get.

Grossman had the idea of solving this problem by creating — Bridging the Cultural Divide through Entrepreneurship — an FME for Israelis and Palestinians. As Grossman said, “I am pushing the thought of peace and understanding through entrepreneurship.”

He started talking to people about it in March 2010 and his vision will soon become a reality. Starting June 26th, 44 students — including 20 Palestinians, 17 Israeli Jews, and seven Israeli Arabs — will come to Babson College’s campus in Wellesley, MA (where I teach).

While there, they will learn the fundamental concepts of entrepreneurship and two teams — 22 each — balanced between those three constituents — will travel and learn together during that time. They will go back home and start the businesses that they planned at Babson for 16 weeks — with seed capital provided by the program sponsors.

And as the student businesses do at Babson, they will give back their profits to the community. They will do that by picking a humanitarian service organization who will receive the profits those businesses generate.

At the end, the student teams will deliver a report to the community. In the audience will be their parents, educators, politicians, diplomats, entrepreneurs, and capital providers. And Grossman will bring them together every three months for reunions.

The goal is to make these students into the mentors for the next course. Will Grossman’s idea help bring peace to the Middle East 44 young people at a time? It’s a wonderful idea and I hope it succeeds.