Five years ago she was climbing the London corporate ladder. She decided to ditch her marketing job and move to Israel with her twin sister Melanie. Today she works for WalkMe, which aims to "make the web experience easy for every person". Launched in 2012, it recently came second in the "Best Start-up From Outside Europe" category at the Europas, the Oscars of European technology; in just over six months, the company increased its staff from 16 to 50.

 

"As a graduate in the UK, you tend to go for huge, established companies, go through endless psychometric tests, and pick something because it sounds good on your CV," says Stefanie. "But here in Israel, there are fewer graduate schemes, so paradoxically it's easier to get involved in something different." 

But Israel of course has the conflict with the Palestinians, and dire relations with some of its neighbours to boot. Thanks to several near-disasters — France placed an arms embargo on Israel two days before the 1967 Six-Day War, and the American Patriot anti-aircraft system, which was supposed to block Saddam Hussein's missile attacks on Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War, only deflected them to hit other cities — the Israeli army has become a sort of  star-factory for technological innovation. 

Talented young students are recruited straight from high school for special elite units. Members of one particularly secretive programme called Talpiot attract wide-eyed wonder among the public — if you get in, you're made for life, people say. Living, studying and socialising almost exclusively together, its 100 or so participants first pursue an intensive degree in a combination of physics, mathematics and computer sciences. The innovation projects they then take part in are top secret, but are rumoured to be revolutionary in terms of technological development. 

In the 1980s, while his contemporaries were watching Back to the Future, Avi Loeb, a graduate of Talpiot, developed a way to make projectiles travel more than ten times faster. Now a professor of science at Harvard, Loeb was only 21 years old when he presented his project to the head of President Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative, the missile-defence programme which became known as Star Wars. 

One product — the Iron Dome missile interceptor designed and manufactured by the government-owned technology company Rafael Advanced Defence Systems — gained worldwide fame (and a huge Twitter following) during the November 2012 Israel-Gaza conflict. Rather than rush to the nearest air raid shelter, some Israelis ran outside to watch Hollywood-style rocket interceptions in the skies. 

Defence officials say that while systems on a similar scale typically take ten to 20 years to develop, Rafael's technological expertise and manpower enabled it to build the Iron Dome in less than three. 

The young developers go on to work in other fields of innovation both in Israel and abroad, with products including  ultrasound surgery systems, drugs to treat multiple sclerosis,  the Java platform inside your Kindle, and Waze, an app that helps drivers to dodge traffic jams.