Between the bright walls of Yazamut 360 – Ben-Gurion University’s entrepreneurship center – intensity is routine. The feverish work ethic, the near-disconcerting seriousness with which students debate investment strategies, pitch biotech ventures or assemble food-tech hackathons: this is the daily rhythm.

What feels extraordinary from the outside is, here, routine. The center, founded nearly a decade ago, by Prof. Carmel Sofer and Dana Gavish, addresses what has become the defining question of higher education over the past twenty years: How do universities actually prepare students for the world beyond the campus gates?

“Academic knowledge is essential,” says Gavish. “We still need to know how to research. But it’s not enough anymore. We must add another layer. A practical, experiential one. You cannot just learn entrepreneurship in theory. You have to go through it.” And yet, paradoxically, Yazamut 360 is not powered solely by futurism. Its forward-looking programs are animated by something older than startup culture, older even than Israel’s high-tech boom. Their fuel is the state's founding vision.

“This University carries his name,” Gavish says, referring to David Ben-Gurion. “He was the first Israeli entrepreneur, and the father of the Negev. When people come to work here in the morning, they open their eyes, and they’re here because Ben-Gurion said: Develop the Negev! So what do you do when you wake up? You develop the Negev.”

Outside her office window, the physical manifestation of that ambition stretches: the campus, the adjacent high-tech park, Soroka University Medical Center, and a train line connecting the desert to the country’s population center. Everything lies within a narrow radius. “It’s an ecosystem,” Gavish says. “But more than that, it’s meaning.” Meaning, for her, is not a rhetorical flourish, but a strategy.

Gavish did not begin her career in academia. Raised in Jerusalem, she spent a decade producing television news during some of Israel’s most turbulent years. She was part of the founding generation of commercial news broadcasting, present for seismic national events, “super serious events,” she calls them, with understated irony. After stints at the Associated Press and later at Fox News, she reached a moment of clarity, which led her into the complex world of technology transfer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

For 13 years she worked at the seam between laboratory and marketplace – commercializing patents, matching chemists and physicists with industry partners, helping transform research into revenue. “I learned how to take academic discoveries and bring them to industry,” she says. “How to build companies around them.”

When Ben-Gurion University of the Negev called nine years ago, what struck her was not merely the professional opportunity. It was the language. “They were talking about entrepreneurship in the Negev,” she recalls. “Not just about excellence. Not just about research. About regional development. About a mission bigger than academia itself.”

Yazamut 360 did not yet exist. Soon after her arrival, Israel’s Council for Higher Education issued a call for universities to establish entrepreneurship centers. Gavish partnered with Prof. Carmel Sofer, a veteran of venture capital and corporate leadership. They drafted a proposal, sent it, waited, and lost.

“It was annoying,” she admits, laughing. “We won fourth place, which is the most annoying place.” In hindsight, she calls it formative. “If we were going to teach, and practice entrepreneurship here, in the desert, we couldn’t try to imitate Tel Aviv. We would never win that competition. So we decided to define entrepreneurship differently.”

At Yazamut 360, entrepreneurship doesn’t necessarily begin with team formation, pitch decks, or venture capital rounds. It begins, according to co-founder Dana Gavish, with skills. “Our KPI is not how many startups we launch,” she says. “Of course, we have startups. But our real question is: What happens to our students? Do they dare more? Do they build networks? Do they feel capable?”

Each year, approximately 5,000 students – nearly a quarter of the university’s population – pass through the center. Almost none receive academic credit for doing so. “They choose to come,” she emphasizes. “They work hard. Blood, sweat and tears.”

Experience here means immersion in uncertainty. Teams form and dissolve, ideas are scrapped and rebuilt, pitches fail, budgets must be managed, and industry partners must be persuaded.“The zigzag story of entrepreneurship runs through everything we do,” Gavish says. “Here, the students have a protected environment for trial and error. It’s okay to fail here.”

For example, alongside highly selective programs, Yazamut 360 hosts 21 student-led communities. From women in entrepreneurship to space and innovation, neuroscience, and food tech. “One of our students launched a course called ‘The Race for the Protein’”, Gavish recounts, smiling.

In doing so, he built a 200-member food-tech community and brought major industry players to campus. “We didn’t plan this,” she says. “It was a hundred percent grassroots. Students came and said: “This is my dream course.” And we said: “Here is the space, here is the funding, here is the marketing. You build the content. It is our job to empower them and push them forward.”

Real money, real responsibility, real growth experience

The center’s most audacious experiment is Cactus Capital, a student-run venture capital fund seeded with one million dollars from the University, a sum unprecedented in Israeli academia at the time. Today, the fund is nearing the end of its second million; a third has already been promised.

“When I understood we had a million dollars to invest in student ventures,” Gavish recalls, “I asked myself: If we are an educational institution, what are we teaching by simply giving out money?” Her answer was to hand the money to students, not as recipients, but as investors.

Every year, roughly 1,500 applicants compete for 36 places in a half-year investment course. Those admitted undergo intensive training before serving as analysts at the fund. They evaluate proposals submitted by their peers, conduct due diligence, and sit on investment committees twice annually, allocating up to NIS 100,000 per venture.

“The first lesson is ethics,” Gavish says. “Because with great power and great money comes great responsibility. They are judging their friends.” The debates, she notes, are rigorous. “Sometimes I sit in those investment committees, and I learn from them. It’s a privilege to listen.”

Another A-team program the center offers to students from all faculties is LEADERS. Founded seven years ago by Hi Tech entrepreneur and corporate veteran Gadi Bahat, LEADERS includes three semesters with a two-week Startup Garage in the summer for translating classroom experience into a venture in the real world.

“Leaders in every field know the secret to success is proactively adapting to change,” says Gavish. The program takes students on a step-by-step journey through the entire process of entrepreneurship, ensuring that they have a solid footing in each stage before proceeding to the next. That way, they arrive at graduation ready to take on the world.

Graduates of LEADERS and Cactus Capital are heavily recruited by venture capital firms, tech companies, and corporate leadership tracks. “They don’t start from the same line as everyone else,” she says. “HR recruiters are looking for them.” On some evenings, five parallel events unfold across campus.

Auditoriums sell out within minutes. The energy feels less like a university and more like a distributed incubator. Students manage budgets, design work plans, and negotiate with corporate speakers. They acquire not only entrepreneurial vocabulary but also administrative discipline. “They leave with a story,” Gavish says. “I came. I built. I failed. I tried again. That story is priceless in a job interview.”

Yazamut 360 also touches researchers and residents of the broader Negev. Negev Plus – an e-commerce training program – opens its doors to local residents seeking to build Amazon storefronts rather than high-tech startups.

“Entrepreneurship is not only for engineers,” Gavish insists. “There is no gatekeeping here.” That refusal to gatekeep may be the center’s quiet revolution. In a country that has mythologized entrepreneurship as synonymous with high-tech disruption, Yazamut 360 reframes it as capability, the ability to identify problems, mobilize people, manage resources, and persist through ambiguity.

On Gavish’s desk stands a rubber duck – unserious, slightly absurd. Around it, spreadsheets, pitch decks, and strategic roadmaps accumulate. Outside, the desert sun lingers over lawns dotted with students who may or may not yet know they will walk through Yazamut 360’s doors.

If the Negev was once imagined as a blank space waiting to be filled, Yazamut 360 suggests a different metaphor: not settlement, but cultivation. Not extraction, but preparation. In the colored rooms of an entrepreneurship center in the desert, the future of Israeli work is being rehearsed – one investment committee, one potential of a prototype, one student-built venture at a time.

This article was written in collaboration with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.