Projects

Milken Innovation Center engages in real world project development, including the design and development of new financing tools to meet the needs of those projects.

Our mission is to overcome worldwide barriers to economic growth and security by synthesizing the complementary strengths of Israel (the Startup Nation) and California (the Scale-Up State), by leveraging joint initiatives in water management, health services, agritech, energy efficiency,and cyber security.

We propose a cluster of activities to strengthen the community and economic development assets of the Jerusalem region.

Due to seismic risk and aging building stock, significant populated areas of Israel suffer from high levels of seismic vulnerability. As the financial research part of a Jerusalem Institute team, we are conducting applied research funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology on innovative solutions for seismic retrofitting by financing structural reinforcement to make residential buildings earthquake-ready for communities in the Jordan Rift Valley of Israel (including Eilat, Beit She’an, Tiberius, Hatzor Haglilit, Safed, and Kiryat Shemona).

These highly vulnerable areas have largely not been included in earthquake upgrading that prioritized more prosperous actors, places and project in more central areas of the country with higher land values since 2005. Translating solutions from California and other regions of high seismic risk, we are adapting innovative finance measure for mass residential retrofitting addressing aesthetic retrofitting, building maintenance, and missile protection.  We have found and reported that neither residential insurance nor government fiscal conditions can withstand the economic shock of major earthquake which is increasingly probable. The magnitude of catastrophic earthquake risk would severely impair banking and capital markets, shrinking tax revenues and depreciating asset values throughout the economy according to the Bank of Israel. We have identified innovative finance tools including catastrophic risk bonds, capital grants, participating investments, partial guarantees, long term loans and structuring credit solutions incentivizing  retrofitting by offering participating lenders loan loss reserve coverage and other credit enhancements for enrolled loans through the private sector.

The Green Bond Fund project is a joint venture between the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Milken Innovation Center to develop a comprehensive set of financial tools to accomplish national environmental goals in carbon emissions reductions.

The Africa-Israel Global Innovation partnership is a multi-layered project that aims to stimulate co-innovation, bilateral business development, and shared research and training between Israel and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.