Israel, you know, is too small of a country to become a world market and too small a country to become a great world producer, but we have enough scientists per square kilometer to become a world laboratory. And smallness has its own advantages; when you are small you can be really daring, you can be a pilot plant.
An excellent realization of the objective situation, and a vision and ambition to exploit ones own strength. Something we're really missing here in Latvia, when somebody talks about how small the country is. You've got to realize: "small" can be an advantage. And education, btw, is always an advantage.
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Being a laboratory or pilot plant is sure easier in small places, but you don't want to get stuck with that, do you. You might have your population's genome analyzed, you might have brand-new services or products pre-tested in that country, but there are limits to this. Particularly in the pre-testing, which can only be technical testing - as you're not really able to test potential consumer reactions in one small market only (cultural differences;, some of which even caused directly by size differences).
So you'd soon end up with a more general "do daring things", as Mr Peres mentioned. I'm afraid, though, that doing daring things is something for the private economy rather than for governments (who usually want to be re-elected next spring, rather than respected in 50 years time).
So a governments' role would mainly be to (sometimes better silently?) support daring initiatives that come from the private sector, and that partly base on the fact that in this particular market, the size is an advantage for the daring endeavour.
In order to achieve this, however, you first have to have the entrepreneurs who could possibly come up with such daring ideas.
Which will usually be multinational teams or companies that work with a strong cross-cultural focus (that's an assumption, but a rather educated one as I believe), so that's the ones one would need to attract.
Which is more likely to work if the country/market is well-known, and the advantage of its size is understood (along with sure some other advantages needed, such as "attractive place to live", "reasonable taxation", "simple public administration", "education level of local workforce", "languages spoken", and more).
Which requires someone (how ironic: probably the government!) to have a clear goal to attract such private entrepreneurs/companies/activities, and to do something actively to attract them. As well as to communicate the opportunity.
Which requires a strategy.
Which is what we don't really have.
Which probably is not a surprise given the frequent changes of governments (though there might be stronger reasons for this lack of visible long-term vision).
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