NEW YORK - Back in January when online music retailer N2K became the first tenant to move into the way wired building at 55 Broad, the sea of gray suits in Manhattan's financial district weathered an invasion of black jeans and suede. But beginning next month, Wall Street and Silicon Alley may have to adjust to a whole new texture: tweed. In the coming weeks Columbia, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon universities, and Brooklyn's Polytechnic University will open satellite offices in the low-cost International Technology Center, to pack brain capital into the busy tech hive.
While each school ostensibly has its own objectives for creating these outposts - from executive education programs and technology research to off-site undergraduate seminars - the motives are clear: the universities have recognized the need to grease the tracks from academia into the marketplace, estimated to be worth US$2.8 billion.
Migration to the International Technology Center could be a simple question of geography, given that these universities "are all far away from the center of the action," says Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Center for Urban Research at New York University. "55 Broad has become a magnet [for technology companies], and they want to be near that magnet to be able network - it gives them a point of presence," he says. Cornell is in rural Ithaca, New York; Carnegie Mellon is in Pittsburgh; Columbia is on the edge of Harlem on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
In effect, the schools are evolving into technology consultants. "We're being asked to give education and mentoring to different organizations," says Clark Jordan, director of the executive education program at Carnegie Mellon. "We'll provide a close place for executives to come and interface with faculty and researchers."
Columbia's Liaison Office at the center will host classes and media clinics on new technologies for executives. The space will be outfitted with workstations and high-end software developed at the university's center for telecommunications.
Polytechnic University, which debuted a preliminary space earlier this year, hopes to operate a new financial engineering program for its graduate students at 55 Broad, as part of its new Institute for Technology and Enterprise. Carnegie Mellon's executive education program will establish an adult-education course for financiers in risk management.
Notably absent is New York University, home of the renowned Interactive Telecommunications program. The program's administrative director, George Agudow, said NYU has no need to migrate because it has already tapped into the market through its professors. "The lion's share of our faculty - like Sharleen Smith [head of USA Networks] or Jaime Levy [designer of Electronic Hollywood] - are already professionals in the industry," Agudow says.
Most universities have traditionally sought relationships with big corporations, but offices in the tech hub at 55 Broad will give them access to the smaller, more aggressive entrepreneurial companies, says Paul Christianson, associate director of Columbia's Center for New Media. The majority of the dozens of high-tech businesses housed in the facility are start-ups, although big names like Sun Microsystems and IBM maintain a presence there.
"There's always been a high percentage of graduate students from Columbia who go to Bell Labs and IBM, but it's been confined to very large companies," Christianson says. "It's been a challenge to interact with the smaller companies in Silicon Alley."
For New York to be taken seriously as part of the tech industry, it needs to nurture these connections between its intellectual and entrepreneurial communities. While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have been terrific engines driving high-tech growth for Boston and Silicon Valley, respectively, New York's universities have so far failed to generate technology. NYU's Moss says the lack of a world-class engineering school has splintered the industry.
As far back as 1939, Stanford's academic community was pollinating the entrepreneurial world beginning to bloom around it. Professor Fred Terman loaned William Hewlett and David Packard $538 to produce an audio oscillator in a garage, making bedfellows of the university and the tech industry, as is still prevalent in the Valley.
"In California or Boston, you can make these links directly through the alumns of the university ... where there is this openness [to new ideas]," says Will Clurman, project director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT. "But New York has not gotten serious yet. [The city] is laden with connections and it's rich, but it's hard to break into."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
