entrepreneurs

After winning accolades from the Israeli parliament for academic achievement and gaining 10 years of experience in building mission-critical systems for the Israel Defense Forces, Amit Aharoni came to Stanford to complete an MBA. Then, like many of his Stanford peers, Aharoni caught the entrepreneurial bug. Last July, he founded a start-up, which is building a shopping engine for buying cruises.

I recently returned from a visit to Chile, which launched an ambitious effort in 2000 to become an IT outsourcing hub. It did so in an effort to break its economic dependence on its mining industry. By offering massive subsidies, the Chilean government created an outsourcing industry that generated $800 million in revenue and employed 20,000 people in 2008.