Israel will host the World Wellness Summit later this year, the largest conference of its kind in the worldfollowing the event was moved twice in the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The three-day GWS will be held at the Tel Aviv Hilton in November. The annual conference brings together entrepreneurs, executives and business owners in fields such as hospitality, tourism, health, beauty and spa, food technology, fitness, medical technology and manufacturing, under the multidimensional term of “ well-being”, which encompasses the pursuit of physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual and environmental well-being.
For Nancy Davis, chief creative officer and CEO of GWS, the location of the upcoming summit was a no-brainer. Tel Aviv is the capital of technology in Israel and is home to a large number of companies and startups from the health sector and wellness.
Boston hosted the summit in 2021, followed by Palm Beach, Florida, Singapore in 2019 and Cesena, Italy in 2018.
The pandemic “woke up the whole world to everything related to wellness”Davis told The Times of Israel during a pilot trip to Tel Aviv last month as they prepare to host the summit.
Although the global wellness economy initially took a hit, rising from $4.9 trillion before the pandemic to $4.5 trillion today, the market is expected to grow to $7 trillion by 2025, according to a report. published last year by Global Wellness Institutethe research branch of GWS.
If the last two years catapulted well-being to the fore, this year is regarding putting together all the pieces of what Davis calls a “giant global puzzle”.
Wellbeing, once a narrow concept, has become the umbrella for a number of vertical industriessuch as fitness, healthy eating, wellness in the workplace, mental wellness, wellness in The tourism and travel, and real estate wellness.
“Now the silos intersect. We see the vitality of… uniting the technology y the innovation with wellness, and how that has helped the wellness world,” said GWS CEO Susie Ellis.
Davis agreed: “If I had to encapsulate one idea that is really going to help drive this year’s summit and its agenda, it would be this idea of convergence.”
According to Davis, Tel Aviv is unmatched in fostering convergence, opening up opportunities for “unexpected collisions.” The overlap between disparate sectors in Israel, its collaborative culture and unique public-private partnerships make it fertile ground for innovation in a rapidly expanding wellness industry.
Ellis and Davis found this out on a visit to IMED, the innovation arm of Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv – Ichilov, to meet with Professor Ronni Gamzu, director of Ichilov and Israel’s former coronavirus czar.
Davis said it was “amazing” to witness wellness, health and technology come to life in a hospital setting.. In addition to incubating startups, IMED has opened an investment branch.
“They bring together doctors, who are entrepreneurs, and their innovations with the financing to bring these companies to life. This is an extraordinary convergence,” she states.
“We knew we were going to find endless innovations in Israel, but to find something that has really struck a nerve in the wellness world, the medical world, and the tech world together, feels like a real ‘aha moment’ to us. he added.
The volume of mental wellness technologies, including therapeutic games, gadgets and apps, leaving Israel has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic. According to Amir Alroy, co-founder of Welltech Ventures and co-chairman of GWS, Israel is now home to 2,000 health-oriented companies, 1,000 digital health companies, and more than 500 wellness technology companies, placing it second only to Silicon Valley. in absolute terms.
The pivot of the pandemic has also had a positive impact on the local wellness industry. Israeli entrepreneurs in the cybersecurity and automotive space were drawn to shocking innovations and “doing good,” Alroy said, so “bright ideas and bright founders, experienced ones, are now in the industry.” [del bienestar]. This is something that did not happen until two years ago.”
Alroy cited, among others, Amnon Bar-Lev, the former president of cybersecurity at Check Point who founded AI healthcare startup Alike; Samuel Keret, who left Waze to found digital health startup Hedonia; and serial cybersecurity entrepreneur Ben Enosh, who founded Antidote Health, a telehealth company for underserved populations in the United States.
Bar-Lev co-founder Varda Shalev, who is also a professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Tel Aviv University School of Public Health and former director of the Morris Kahn and Maccabi Research and Innovation Institute, will be one of the key summit speakers.
