By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
Israeli innovation has the potential to solve some of the great challenges for humanity, a veteran entrepreneur believes, and she is determined to ensure it claims its rightful place in the spotlight.
Nicky Newfield created Impact Nation last fall to help startups with the potential for global impact to promote themselves and their stories, driving the technology forward and bringing the innovation to a greater audience in an accessible and engaging way.
Impact Nation helps the young companies, which Newfield identifies as “impact entrepreneurs,” to raise awareness of their product and tap into their motivation as well as their innovation.
These companies are so involved in their R&D, Newfield explains, that they more often than not neglect the crucial marketing side of their venture.
“Often, the companies don’t have a marketing department,” she says. “They don’t have any kind of storytelling – maybe they’ve made a corporate video.”
Using the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a starting point, Newfield and her colleagues identified six sectors in which Israeli innovation can create a positive change in the world.
The 17 global goals include ending poverty and hunger, developing affordable clean energy, and providing quality education and clean water and sanitation. Impact Nation singled out from them the ecosystems of food security, climate, health, water, equality and economic empowerment.
“We’ve done a very extensive work in understanding the industries that need to be solved, then we’ve understood the micro challenges inside of each of these industries,” Newfield tells NoCamels.
From there, Impact Nation honed in on the Israeli startups that are making real advances in these areas and have the potential to spark massive interest. These startups, Newfield says, mainly involve deep technology that can solve real world challenges.
She gives the example of food security, a pressing issue for a planet with a rapidly growing global population and changing climate that presents its own challenges in ensuring there is enough for everyone to eat.
“We say right, in cell-based meats, which company is doing exceptional work, who’s interesting and who’s got an interesting story to tell,” Newfield explains.
In fact, Impact Nation works with Rehovot-based Aleph Farms, which uses proteins in cell cultures to create beef steaks and recently became the world’s first company to receive government approval to publicly sell its cultivated meat.
When the Impact Nation team has located the most suitable companies, Newfield – an angel investor provides seed funding for startups – either invests in them herself or matches them with other investors.
“We have access to around 100 companies that we directly or indirectly invested in,” she says.
Some of the funding for Impact Nation comes from Newfield and other investors, and some from government bodies such as the Israel Innovation Authority and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose remit includes promoting the Israeli tech sector on the international stage.
The Impact Nation team examines every aspect of the companies they select, aiming to address their needs and challenges and ties that to the challenges facing the world.
“We invested financially, and then our role is to tell the impact story – so this was a natural leap,” Newfield says.
“What we identified very early is that it has to be done through storytelling,” she explains.
“We know that the most important way to really access people is through this human story. And usually, there’s a very deep reason why each person is doing what they’re doing passionately. We believe that the companies that are solving a mission are doing it for a personal reason, and they are far more likely to succeed.”
This storytelling involves producing videos about the individual companies and how they came to be. Among them is Nevia Bio, which uses machine learning AI to help early detection of women’s diseases. The company was started by its CEO Inbal Zafir-Lavie, who lost her sister to ovarian cancer eight years ago and was determined to ensure that other women did not share this fate.
“What you want to do is help Nevia Bio to succeed, because we need Inbal to succeed – we need to get her message out there,” Newfield says.
“We know that underpinning what she’s doing is passion for life, for sharing her passion with the world and not just keeping what she finds to herself. That’s what she needs to tell the world but she doesn’t have a voice.”
When a video is ready, Impact Nation provides a digital marketing package for that company, including hashtags to help reach their audiences, and then trains them in how to sell themselves.
Impact Nation is a natural progression for Newfield, who is the founding partner of Arc Impact Foundation, an organization seeking to improve people’s lives through investing in areas such as education, vocational training and healthcare.
She has also managed accelerator programs for SDG-focused startups, spent nearly two decades as a physiotherapist and established women’s health practices in rural Africa.
Newfield works side by side with fellow native South African Guy Lieberman, the director of Impact Nation and an experienced activist specializing in campaign-based filmmaking who has previously collaborated with the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.
“Israeli tech is known around the world as this body of absolute genius, but what isn’t known is the warm human body behind that tech,” Lieberman tells NoCamels.
Frequently, Israeli innovators see professionalism as needing a cooler approach, and strive to suppress their own emotions about their work. And so, Lieberman explains, the warmth that is so central to storytelling has to be coaxed out of them.
“And often the magic happens,” he says. “We arrive at the sweet spot where the technology is extraordinary, the story’s amazing and it’s very well told.”
