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multidisciplinary teams. Today mechanical engineers Netanyahu and former US president Barak Obama. PTC
must understand all the other fields that exist in the has also expanded its support in recent years across
industry, such as software engineering. It’s wrong many different faculties, providing professional cours-
to think in closed curriculums anymore because the es, projects, lectures, and symposiums.
products themselves are always multidisciplinary.”
As part of the new agreement, PTC will transfer its
What changes would you make to engineering 100-employee, Haifa-based development center from
curriculums? the Matam tech park to a dedicated building at the
Technion. The company will also provide a large annu-
“My guideline is that I’m not interested in what the al budget for collaborative research in strategic areas
students have learned, but in what they know. There such as IoT, augmented reality, simulations, and gen-
are students who might be at the top of their class, erative design. The company will support all the Tech-
but in practice don’t know how to perform the tasks nion’s faculties, supplying software products, offering
they are given. It’s important to learn for knowledge scholarships and incentives for students and research-
and not just for grades. I would like to see students ers, running hackathons and other competitions, and
working with their counterparts in other faculties; being actively involved in educational programs.
and I think projects should be evaluated according to
ambition, teamwork, and the intelligent formulation Dr. Ben Horin , you yourself completed a PhD at
of lessons learned. For me, even if the project failed, the Technion. Did you ever consider remaining in ac-
it can be counted as a success if we are able to ana- ademia?
lyze the reasons it failed.”

"Scientific and technological breakthroughs today
require multidisciplinary research and close cooper-
ation between academia and industry,” concludes
Technion President Uri Sivan. “The industry is at the
forefront of applied research and knows the needs
of the market well; academia, for its part, brings the
basic science and in-depth research. Therefore, in re-
cent years the Technion has been working tirelessly to
strengthen its ties with industry. The new agreement,
which will lead to the establishment of a PTC office
on campus, will further solidify the longstanding re-
lationship between the company and the Technion,
allowing both sides to develop, grow, and enjoy the
fruits of this partnership.”

The PTC development center will The job is
move to a designated building “The truth is that I thought about it a lot and de- multidisciplinary,
on the Technion campus bated with myself about whether to stay, but I ulti- so the education

The collaboration between PTC and the Technion must be, too.
extends far beyond donations. A few years ago, the
company partnered with the Technion to launch a mately decided it was important for me to work in the
program for robotics and digital content in the Fac-
ulty of Education in Science and Technology. In this industry. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on re-
framework a laboratory was established for teaching
advanced technologies related to IoT, CAD/CAM, aug- search. Quite the opposite – during my years at Rafa-
mented reality, and other fields. Hundreds of students
have already studied in this lab, conducting collabo- el I studied and developed complex systems, leading
rative studies that have been published to an interna-
tional audience. An educational robot developed in research teams and processes.”
the lab was shown to former Prime Minister Benjamin
If your company’s vision is realized, will we all be

replaced by robots?

“I don’t think there’s any danger of that. But com-

puters are able to calculate, analyze, and come up

with solutions at a level beyond human capabilities.

Our goal is to precisely formulate the problem and

use the most advanced tools to achieve the best pos-

sible design.” 

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