Innovation Beyond Ithaca: Cornell Tech

Despite leaving office years ago, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg continues to meaningfully impact the future of The Big Apple. Yesterday, joined by Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Cornell University President Martha Pollack, Technion President Peretz Lavie, and Cornell Tech Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, Bloomberg celebrated the official opening of the two billion dollar Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. In 2011, the massive concept submitted jointly by Cornell and the Israel Institute of Technology, Technion won Mayor Bloomberg’s Administration’s visionary Applied Sciences Competition, designed to foster innovation with the goal of making the city a global power in technology. The proposed 12 acre campus was forecast to create up to 8,000 permanent jobs and economic activity in excess of $23 billion over a 35 year year period.

The Bloomberg Center “is intended to spur collaboration — That’s why there are very few walls in the building, and where they exist, they are often transparent,” Bloomberg stated. “This may be the only university building in the world with no private offices for professors. And that is a feature, not a bug.”

Bloomberg explained that the campus is built on four pillars of strength:

1. Interconnections between academia and companies

2. Global economic development

3. Pipeline of tech talent

4. Institutional leadership

Cornell University Board of Trustees Chair Robert S. Harrison ’76 reflected, “I have been actively involved with Cornell since I was an undergraduate more than 40 years ago, and I can say – with both confidence and awe – that this is the single biggest Cornell event I have witnessed in those 40-plus years. Cornell Tech is both completely transformative and completely consistent with Cornell’s mission and values, going all the way back to the university’s founding in 1865.”

The technology campus on Roosevelt Island is the latest addition to Cornell University, an Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York.

“Today shows the intelligent way forward, and the ability to achieve it. The truth is this: An economy that does not invest today in the industries of tomorrow is destined to be trapped in the jaws of yesterday,” Cuomo said. “In New York, we know that our future is what we make it. We know what needs to be done, and we are doing it.”