Mumbai: India and Israel have planned a substantially hike in their joint industrial R&D fund for incubating innovative ideas into successful business ventures. The Bilateral Industrial R&D fund (BIRD), which was set up in 2005 with a corpus of $3 million, would see a multi-fold increase in the near future, agency reports quoting Israel''s ambassador to India David Danieli. The fund is being routed through a board-run institution and an expert committee selects the projects eligible for incubating assistance. Israel spends 4.5 per cent of its GDP on civilian R&D, which is more in percentage terms than the expenditure of the US, the UK, Italy and Japan. Israel is one of the front-runners in agriculture R&D and has developed state-of-the-art technology in dairy farming, trickle-drip irrigation, soil solarisation and sustained use of industrial waste for farming.

Danieli said that Israel was also cooperating with India in the field of agriculture research and has identified 10 areas for joint research. From defence equipment to genomics and agriculture, Israel is in the forefront of cutting-edge scientific research.

• It was an Israeli company called Mirabilis, which developed the internationally popular ICQ instant messaging platform and later sold to AOL.
• Intel''s Israeli R&D team designed the Pentium M/Centrino and the dual core processor which is used in laptops with an Intel processor.
• Microsoft''s Israel R&D team developed most of Windows NT and the popular Windows XP operating system is built on top of NT.
• Israel also has the IBM''s largest R&D facilities outside the United States.