Universities have been adding or supplementing entrepreneur business programs to increase the likelihood of success. Many have entrepreneurs-in-residence, some provide venture investment and others are building access to a community of seasoned serial entrepreneurs and investors to school young protegés on how to successfully commercialize their ideas. Cornell University has gone a few steps further to break down the boundaries that typically separate the academic and business community.
A panel discussing Cornell Tech, organized by the New York City Health Business Leaders (@NYCHBL), focused on its structure. Its Dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, said the grad school program will revolve around three tracks. One is for health IT and mobile health called Healthier Life. There are two others: Connected Media and the Built Environment, which will be all about the Internet of Things.
Collaboration will be the operative word. Members of the grad school in the healthcare track will work with the healthcare and business communities to see where the technology pain points are. One of the participating institutions is, naturally, Weill Cornell Medical College. The idea is each student will develop a product or service in collaboration with a business and give monthly presentations on milestones they have reached.
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Cornell Tech is starting small to make it easier to tweak its programs accordingly. It had a “beta semester” earlier in the year with about seven students in the Connected Media space. In January, it will add the healthcare track. The Built Environment will come later.
Although the program is currently housed at Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea, the goal is to have its own campus on Roosevelt Island — between Manhattan and Queens — by 2017.It will officially be called the NYCTech Campus, and it will be a joint effort with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
Deborah Estrin, who previously worked for several years as a computer science professor at UCLA, also runs a nonprofit startup company called Open mHealth. The idea is that each of our small data could be used to analyze digital traces we leave when we watch TV, talk on the phone or exercise. It could be used give each person a deep dive of their personal health. She envisions creating something of a greenhouse for mhealth at the school.
So far Cornell Tech has 10 professors including one joining in January. It will even have a venture capitalist in residence — in contrast to an entrepreneur in residence that many business schools like to have.
If the plans for the program are realized it will become a hub for collaboration in health IT and in other sectors. The hope is it will give the city the kind of entrepreneurial profile on the national map that tends to be associated with Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Silicon Valley, a prospect which excited many of the investors in attendance.
