“I can say without exaggeration that Israel could not have been built without the Technion,” says Yossi Vardi, who has founded or helped build more than 60 companies in Israel and has five degrees from the Technion. “There is a Technion graduate behind practically every highway, desalinization plant, new missile technology and start-up company in the country.”

This is not mere school spirit talking. According to Shlomo Maital, senior research fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology, a fourth of the university’s 60,000 alumni who are of working age have, at one time or another, initiated a business, and a fourth are C.E.O.’s or vice presidents. The annual output of graduates in high-tech industries is estimated to be at least $21 billion. Among inventions from Technion research labs: the memory stick, drip irrigation, the Parkinson’s drug rasagiline, the iron dome air defense system and instant messaging.

“Just how does the Technion do it?” Mr. Lavie asks himself, clearly amazed.

EMBEDDED in the Haifa curriculum is learn by doing. Interdisciplinary courses that combine business and innovation — like “Technological Entrepreneurship,” taught by Dan Shechtman, a Nobel laureate in chemistry — are the most popular on campus.

The curriculum at the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute will be similarly multidisciplinary. The institute is a major component of the new Cornell Tech campus scheduled to open on Roosevelt Island in 2017 and currently being rolled out in temporary headquarters in Chelsea. Craig Gotsman, a Technion computer science professor with two start-ups under his belt, will direct the institute, which will ultimately be responsible for a third of the academic activity on campus. Next year, the institute will begin recruiting students who are interested in “connective media,” one of three focal hubs (the others: “healthier life” and “built environment”).

The hope is to build an ecosystem like Haifa’s, where industry and academics feed off each other. And, says Mr. Gotsman, “to provide the necessary background and skills to top off the typical science/engineering degree offered in the United States, which, while providing fundamentals, does not fully prepare students for hands-on, cutting-edge work in an industrial environment.”

Mr. Vardi, a Technion board member and one of Israel’s most high-profile entrepreneurs, puts it more simply: “What the Technion is really bringing is its genes. It’s like bringing in genes from outside the family.” When tasked with explaining where the innovative fervor comes from, Israelis often refer to DNA — a belief that there is something genetic in the determination of its students.