Forbes Education Technology Innovation Series: Daniel Huttenlocher, Cornell NYC Tech

Cornell NYC Tech’s Dean On The Future Of Entrepreneurship In New York

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

01-27-2014

In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.

The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.

(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, please visit this link. This is the eighth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior seven articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visitthis link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Dan, what is Cornell NYC Tech’s mission?

Daniel Huttenlocher: Our mission is to increase the amount of technology talent in the New York area and in the nation with a particular kind of twist or take on technology talent both in terms of the students and faculty that we are attracting. It is people who have a passion for really deep technological invention and innovation, and at the same time the breadth to engage with real world problems and bring that technology out of the laboratory and classroom into the real world.

We are a new graduate school in New York City in tech disciplines, and we are focused on the disciplines related to the digital information age and the tech sector more generally. We have masters and doctoral students and programs in New York City. We are roughly a year in, as we commenced our beta class in January 2013 with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science as the first-degree program that we’re offering.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• To what extent did you draw parallels to other academic institutions like Stanford or MIT that have close ties to the venture and the high tech world?
• As you thought about building the resources for the organization, how have you balanced between traditional academics (people who are from the academic world) and people with startup experience?
• How do you define success and what are some examples of a successful outcome for students who go through this program?
•  You have partnered with a variety of companies. How have you gone about selecting and reaching out to them?
• How did you choose New York City and why not the university’s primary campus in Ithaca, New York?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Daniel, click here.