Cornell Tech has launched a new, digital guide highlighting the many cultural attributes of its campus on Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and cultural app created by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The Bloomberg Connects app, available for download from Google Play or the App Store, makes Cornell Tech accessible for either on- or off-site visits through photo, audio and video features – offering insights into how the campus is achieving its mission of driving technology and the AI era towards lasting economic and social prosperity for New York City and the world.

Visitors engaging with Cornell Tech on the Bloomberg Connects platform will be able to explore key features of the state-of-the-art campus including some artworks that are not available for public in-person viewing. Included in the app content are the following highlights:

• Images and details about commissioned artworks that relate to the mission of the academic community
• Fun facts about the sustainability features of the LEED-certified buildings on campus such as The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center being one of the largest buildings in New York City designed for net-zero consumption
• Video overviews of Cornell Tech’s nine master’s degree programs offered across sectors such as connective media, urban tech, business, law, and health tech

“We are thrilled to share the many highlights of Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus with a worldwide audience on the Bloomberg Connects platform,” said Greg Morrisett, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. ​“Our impressive art installations, cutting-edge facilities, energy-efficient buildings, and campus design all contribute to making Cornell Tech one of the best destinations in the world to educate leaders, create new technologies, and launch ventures. We are grateful for the opportunity to showcase these attributes thanks to our partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies.”

“During our time in City Hall, we helped launch Cornell Tech as a way to keep New York City on the cutting edge of technological innovation. Since then, the team at Bloomberg Philanthropies has worked with the university to create a campus that celebrates forward-thinking art and design,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. “Now, audiences around the world will have an opportunity to learn more about Cornell Tech’s immersive artwork and sustainable design — and to gain a better understanding of its contributions to the city’s tech industry. More than 365 world-class institutions are using the Bloomberg Connects app to expand access to art and culture, and we’re excited that Cornell Tech is now among them.”

Located on Roosevelt Island, Cornell Tech’s 12-acre campus is New York City’s most cutting-edge high-tech destination, comprising a thriving and inclusive community of creative thinkers who work at the crossroads of research, education, and innovation. Cornell Tech was made possible by an economic development initiative of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral administration, which included an award competition among institutions of higher education worldwide that ended in 2011 with Cornell University and its partner, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, being named the winners. The partnership between Cornell Tech and Bloomberg Philanthropies dates back to a $100 million gift in 2014 to construct The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, the first academic building on the campus and the home to most of its art collection.

Bloomberg Connects offers free digital guides to cultural organizations around the world. The app platform is part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ longstanding commitment to supporting digital innovation in the arts. Bloomberg Connects makes it easy to access and engage with arts and culture from mobile devices when visiting in person, or anytime from anywhere. With dynamic content exclusive to each partner organization, the app provides a range of features including video, audio, and text; expert commentary; and way-finding maps. Follow Bloomberg Connects on Instagram, Facebook, and X for updates on new guide launches, exhibit highlights, and more.

The post Cornell Tech Launches New Digital Campus Guide on Bloomberg Connects appeared first on Cornell Tech.

New technologies are now faster, cheaper, and easier to develop than ever before. But such rapid and often unchecked innovation can sometimes lead to harmful outcomes.

For Frederic Rubinstein ’52, LLB ’55, “The right kind of entrepreneurship and technology should make a significant positive contribution to improving life on our planet.”

Having devoted a substantial portion of his legal career to startup and technology companies, Rubinstein is “enthused about Cornell’s aggressive entry into the tech arena.” He sees Cornell Tech’s diverse coalition of academics, students, and creators as a golden opportunity to address some of the biggest issues of the day, given that we live in “difficult times, culturally, politically, and economically.” Rubinstein wants to make it easier for students to transform their best ideas and most promising products and services into viable and socially responsible tech companies.

That’s why he and his wife Susan gave a $1-million gift to the campus to establish the Frederic and Susan Rubinstein Fund for Social Benefit in Entrepreneurial Programs. The Fund will support efforts to foster active and intelligent civic engagement by improving health and education—ambitious students will have more opportunities than ever to create socially impactful projects to make a real difference.

Rubinstein’s gift will help propel a widely shared ethos across campus.

Aaron Holiday, a Managing Entrepreneurial Officer who works closely with Cornell Tech spinout startups and the school’s Startup Studio program, shares the Rubinsteins’ commitment to promoting social responsibility in new tech. An ethic of social responsibility is, Holiday said, “critically important to the work that we do,” especially in a world where tech is embedded in every aspect of society and has an enormous impact on an ever-growing number of people.

“When we first started creating studio startups, just like everyone else, we were really excited about drones, virtual reality, blockchain, and cryptocurrency,” Holiday said. “But what has been most rewarding, and surprising, as a person who’s been involved in helping to build all of this, is students’ strong interest in purpose-driven companies.”

In recent years, Cornell Tech students have conceived of and launched products to make mobile phones more accessible to illiterate people, make speech therapy more accessible to children with speech impediments, and make it easier for special education teachers to track data that help improve outcomes for students with autism.

Holiday is particularly proud of how the Cornell Tech Startup Awards, which offer winning teams up to $100,000 in post-academic, pre-seed funding, have helped allow students who “might not traditionally have had an opportunity to build a company to have a swing at bat.”

In addition to creating opportunities for such students, Holiday said, questions about social entrepreneurship and social responsibility are embedded in the Startup Award application itself.

“We want students from the very beginning, at the earliest stages of a company’s formation, to think about social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, and the ethical impact of tech on the world,” Holiday said.

One such venture, Full Plate, is an online service designed to help low-income customers access nutritious, fully prepared meals. Co-founder Ryan Lupton, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’18, realized an entire customer segment was being overlooked by meal delivery services such as Blue Apron, Green Chef, and HelloFresh. “We wanted to understand how we could bring the same sort of convenience [provided by other meal delivery services], but also bring nutrition, and offer it at a price point that low-income customers and families could afford,” he said.

Co-founder Chris Stuart, a Parsons Design and Technology MFA student, agrees, and added, “My motivation to create Full Plate came in part from seeing how my family and the people of Puerto Rico were struggling even to get food on their plates after Hurricane Maria, let alone eat nutritiously. The name ‘Full Plate’ comes from my desire to help bring full, healthy meals to people’s tables.”

Although Full Plate is launching in New York City, Stuart would love to bring it to his home of Puerto Rico one day. “What’s important is that being part of a social entrepreneurship team we’re not measuring our success based solely in terms of what’s profitable,” he said. “Success for me and Ryan means that we’ve improved people’s lives. That’s how I define social entrepreneurship: we’re doing this for the social impact and to improve people’s health and better their everyday lives.”

Like Holiday, Lupton said much of the campus energy for socially conscious projects comes from the students themselves. “The idea and the importance of social entrepreneurship on Cornell Tech’s campus is really led by students who are, for the most part, digitally native,” he said. “And they have a clear vision for how they want technology to be used in a way that improves lives. That student-led initiative is a big piece of what I value about Cornell Tech.”

Both Lupton and Stuart are grateful for the opportunity to pour their energy and drive into socially conscious entrepreneurship. ”What I value most,” said Stuart, “is the opportunity to work with people from diverse backgrounds, meet all these people with all these different skills, and figure out how they can combine to make one amazing startup.”

The post How Cornell Tech Aims to Foster ‘the right kind of entrepreneurship’ appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Members of the WiTNY community recently gathered at Cornell Tech to hear from Program Director Judith Spitz, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development of New York Alicia Glen, and Winternship alumni as well as a panel of distinguished women in the tech community.

Kicking things off, Spitz explained why gender equity in tech is so important, mentioning that teams with better gender diversity perform better and have a higher return on investment. “If you care about revenue and profitability, you want to have more women in tech,” Spitz said. She added that there aren’t enough people working in tech to fill the jobs, that it can help women get into a higher income bracket, and that not enough women advance to leadership positions.

Glen discussed how this lack of female leaders impacts the New York City economy specifically and why it’s critical to have more diverse leaders in the field. “The pipeline is more than leaking. We are going backward in a lot of ways so we need to push as many buttons as possible to launch women ahead in the tech sector because now is the time to start fighting for parity and seniority,” said Glen. “When it comes to technology and thinking about the future of the economy in New York City it has to be about being female. The future is female,” she said, adding that we are an inflection point.

Following introductions from Spitz and Glen, the panel — moderated by Cornell Tech’s Executive-in-Residence Denise Young Smith, formerly Apple’s Chief Human Resources Officer and Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity — discussed actionable ways to capitalize on the inflection point and create a more inclusive tech community. The panelists included Verizon’s Chief Network Engineering Officer and Head of Wireless Network Nicola Palmer, Accenture’s Senior Global Inclusion and Diversity Managing Director Nellie Borrero, and CUNY’s Professor and Dean Gilda Barabino.

Here were some of the key takeaways from the panel conversation:

Practice inclusive leadership:

Inclusive leaders are authentic, empathetic, transparent, and focused on relationship building, according to Smith. Inclusive leaders create a culture where collaboration, acknowledging diverse opinions, and avoiding favoritism are valued and rewarded. Although leaders help to set the values and expectations for the team, people at all levels must contribute by adopting the same values.

Palmer learned what makes someone an inclusive leader firsthand when she worked with a manager who fit the definition. When Palmer was out of the office for months with a significant health issue, her manager took over her role until she came back but still called her each week to ask her opinion and keep her informed.

“There was nothing he needed my advice on because he had done the job,” Palmer said. “But that man called me about once a week,” she said. “The reason he called was to keep me engaged and to keep my spirits up when I was feeling down,” she said, “It was a lasting lesson for me about being inclusive and caring about people and keeping that connection because, in the end, that’s what it’s about.” Now she incorporates those tenets into her own leadership style.

Build a supportive community and empower one another:

Foster inclusive leadership in your community so that you can all learn from one another and grow together. Barabino learned this from her experience as the first African American female to serve as engineering dean in the United States at a school that is not a historically black college. When she joined, people lined up outside her office every day to find out how she got where she was in a homogenous field. People talked about feeling isolated as the “only one” — for example, one of the few women or people of color in their class. Barbino started a group so the women would have a supportive community and a space to share their experiences and identify solutions to the inherent difficulties of being a minority in a male-dominated field.

Develop the courage to challenge the status quo:

Many workplaces have an inherent “boys club” culture like the ones the women experienced at Barbino’s school. When asked how to survive and thrive in that type of culture, Borrero said that female leaders who need to survive and thrive in a white-male-dominated culture have to tell their story, be courageous, and ask for what they want, both in their careers and from their workplaces.

As she became a leader herself, she had the leverage to “challenge the status quo” and point out the lack of diversity during the hiring process. But she explained that people at all seniority levels can encourage change by finding advocates and sponsors who care about creating a change in the organization.

The post 3 Tips to Foster an Inclusive Environment in Technology appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Last month, Silicon Alley insiders spoke about why New York City is poised to succeed with Selina Wang, a Bloomberg News reporter, at Bloomberg Live’s Sooner Than You Think conference hosted at the recently opened Cornell Tech campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. Google CIO Ben Fried, City of New York CTO Miguel Gamiño, Jr., Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, and Union Square Ventures partner Andy Weissman joined Wang on the panel, Silicon Alley: Out From Silicon Valley’s Shadow. They shared insights why Silicon Alley’s tech ecosystem is on the rise.

Technology is improving communities in New York City

When Gamiño spoke to Mayor De Blasio about the city’s mission he learned that the mayor’s goal is to use technology to strengthen communities by fostering more inclusive neighborhoods and creating new opportunities for people. “It was never about tech for tech’s sake which changes the dynamic for a technologist when you’re thinking about solving real problems and using technology as a tool for delivering those solutions as opposed to just thinking about technology in the tech silo,” said Gamiño.

When asked about a difference between Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, he noted that there are diverse people and industries taking advantage of technology, which leads to an increased range of conversations and engagement. “Technology is the future of every industry, not just itself. New York really exemplifies that,” he added.

Silicon Alley is removing friction

How does an idea effectively and efficiently transform into a business? Weissman thinks the answer is removing friction so it’s easier to go turn an idea. “I think ecosystems of entrepreneurial activity are about friction and the lack of friction,” he said noting that Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley lack friction. He added that there is not a lot of friction in New York because there is top talent and an always-expanding community of tech companies and venture capital firms.

Silicon Alley is a tech magnet

Leading technology companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Verizon have offices in New York City. Karp notes that it’s likely a signal that more companies will “find a home and a center of gravity” in diverse, media-centric cities like New York City.

New York City is also home to a number of New York City-born companies valued at more than $1 billion including Warby Parker, Blue Apron, and OscarHealth. Venture capital firms have also heard the city’s siren song. Some of the top firms are exclusively in New York and almost all have a New York City presence. It’s clear that companies can recruit top talent, grow a customer base, and get funding in Silicon Alley and the companies that choose to do so are increasing.

Fostering the next generation of tech talent

The New York City tech ecosystem has no shortage of advocates, from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s lofty 2010 competition for an applied sciences campus in 2010 to countless public and private partnerships to encourage innovation. In 2011, Bloomberg said that Cornell Tech would, “educate tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and create the jobs of the future,” and that “this partnership has so much promise because we share the same goal: to make New York City home to the world’s most talented workforce.” Fast forward to 2017 and Fried has already noticed Cornell Tech’s impact.

“It’s no accident that we are here on Cornell Tech’s campus. I think there is an uptick in what will happen in New York,” noted Fried who pointed to the 38 startups that have come from Cornell Tech in just a few years. “Great universities and great education are often the foundation of great technology workforces and entrepreneurs. And it seems to me like there is more and more of that happening,” he said to the crowd convened at Cornell Tech.

Watch the full conversation.

The post How Silicon Alley Hopes to Catch up to the Valley appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Khaire’s research focuses on entrepreneurship in the creative industries, such as art, advertising, architecture and design, fashion, film, music, publishing, and theater. In particular, she is interested in understanding how entrepreneurs create markets for new categories of cultural goods by constructing their value, while also changing consumers’ beliefs about what attributes of cultural goods are appropriate and valuable.

Description:

Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion.

Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of “pioneer entrepreneurs”—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways. The book particularly sheds light on how the twin developments shaping our world today – digitalization and globalization – influence entrepreneurship in creative industries and by extension, change culture and society.

Book available for purchase from Stanford University Press.

The post Cornell Tech Professor Publishes Book About the Relationship Between Art and Business appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Warby Parker’s Neil Blumenthal envisions his hip eyewear maker becoming the world’s biggest optical company.

“We are not building Warby Parker and our brand to scale and flip it, but to last and be around for a hundred years—and hopefully have a big impact,” said Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO, at the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg speaker series.

After guiding the disruptive industry innovator to a $1.2 billion valuation through five rounds of funding, Blumenthal believes it’s vital to continue growing Warby Parker, but without abandoning the brand’s core values: great products, attainable prices, strong customer experiences and social entrepreneurship. The key to the company’s continuing success, he asserts, is keeping intact many of the company’s “traditions and rituals,” while also accepting change.

“Change is inevitable and happening faster than ever before,” Blumenthal told the audience in Bloomberg’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan. “We have to welcome and embrace it.”

Read the full article on Tech at Bloomberg.

The post Warby Parker Co-CEO Speaks at Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Series appeared first on Cornell Tech.