Students listen to a guest lecture in the Cornell Tech MBA program in NYC
When Vivian Ho started looking into MBA programs, she wanted an experience that would allow her to turbocharge her career as a technology consultant for Deloitte and that would provide the core skills to launch her own consulting shop or startup. The 27-year-old professional from Northern Virginia had studied computer information systems at James Madison University before getting her job at Deloitte where she had worked for nearly five years.
“I needed to get a better sense of my business skills and the thinking process in larger companies,” explains Ho, who knew she wanted to stay in the tech sector. “I also wanted to understand what was required to build a startup. It’s a very different set of skills from managing a traditional business project.”
When she came across the Cornell Tech MBA program in New York, Ho felt she had found her ideal MBA experience. “There was more of a technology focus than in traditional MBA programs. A lot of other programs only offered a few classes and technology wasn’t as integrated into the program as it is at Cornell Tech.”
CORNELL TECH MBA: P&Q’S MBA PROGRAM OF THE YEAR IN 2017
So Ho enrolled in the program on the newly opened Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City and will graduate with her MBA in May. She not only has no regrets, but is a passionate advocate for what is one of the world’s most innovative MBA experiences. “I was very excited to learn the disruptive technologies and what impact they have on the world. I want to be able to make a difference and the students in this program are really ambitious and a lot of them are spinning out and creating their own startups.”
Cornell Tech’s unique MBA approach, the creativity of its curriculum and the devotion of faculty and staff have earned the degree Poets&Quants’ inaugural Program of Year award. Business schools all over the world are innovating new ways to teach business skills to young professionals, modernizing traditonal MBA programs and launching new more specialized degrees in such fields as data analytics and chain supply management.
But Cornell Tech’s MBA program stands apart, a sparkling jewel of an educational experience that has been creatively designed to deliver on what the blooming tech industry sorely needs: Ambitious and intelligent young professionals adept in product management skills. It is a program of and for the digital economy, where technology is transforming every facet of how the world lives, works and plays. No student leaves this MBA program without a highly valuable toolkit in turning ideas into real product and services, a core MBA function in many of the world’s leading tech companies from Amazon and Apple to Google and Microsoft.
GETTING A LEG UP IN THE TECH INDUSTRY
Dan Huttenlocher, the founding dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech
“If you really want to have one leg up in the tech industry, the best and most unique MBA is the Cornell Tech degree,” says Dan Huttenlocher, the founding dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech. “The experience of working on product development teams drives these tech companies. That is just such a critical part of the technology corporate landscape. Steve Jobs was a consummate product guy. Mark Zuckerberg is incredibly engaged in product development. So are Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. If you want to excel in the tech industry, this is it.”
What makes this MBA unique? Start with the fact that it’s not for everyone. This is a tech-focused MBA, a year in length, on the newest and coolest university campus in the U.S. in New York City. Unlike any other MBA program, you will study and work with students in computer science, engineering, design, law, and info systems. That alone makes for a rather exhilarating, if sometimes exasperating, experience and one that is far more real-world than merely working with other like-minded MBA classmates.
But the most innovative centerpiece of this MBA is its so-called studio curriculum. Experiential learning, involving project work, consulting assignments and formal presenations, is all the rage in MBA programs these days. But Cornell Tech has taken this to a new and novel extreme. Up to one third of the MBA experience is all about studio work.
A TRULY UNIQUE STUDIO CURRICULUM THAT MAKES UP NEARLY A THIRD OF THE PROGRAM
First, in the fall semester, there is product studio. The school assigns students to five-or-six person teams to tackle new products, services and strategies for an organization. An advisor from the company issuing the challenge provides support. Students then roll up their sleeves and go to work. They do user research, hatch a strategy, develop and test prototypes of a new product or service that ideally meets the needs of the assignment. Ultimately, of course, they present their findings and demo their ideas.
These are wide-ranging assignments from well-known companies, such as Google, American Express, J.P. Morgan, Weight Watchers and Bloomberg, and non-profit or government organizations, such as the Robin Hood Foundation and the New York City Mayor’s Office. One team’s challenge from Weight Watchers, for example, was to answer the question, “How might we tackle teenage weight loss in a manner that makes teenagers feel good about themselves and not like they are on a program?” Google sought advice on how to encourage people to get a balanced view on such controversial topics as gun control.
But that’s not all. In the spring semester, there is startup studio. During this experience, students organized themselves into teams, finding classmates with complementary skills to do an actual startup. Students evaluate ideas, pick one to explore and then do everything from a pitch deck to a prototype before presenting to local VCs and angel investors. All through the process, teams gain the benefit of working with active entrepreneurs and managers who help to guide the group through the process of creation.
LEARNING BY DOING PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
While many teams turn their ideas into actual businesses, the real goal of startup studio is product management. It’s to learn what it takes to work with people unlike yourself on an idea and bring it to fruition—that is a much-needed skill at existing companies or in entrepreneurial ventures. One team has come up with a mobile app that provides young children with inexpensive and highly accessible speech therapy. Another team has done a fintech in the freelance insurance market.
“The studio is the embodiment of the fundamental principle of the Cornell Tech campus,” says Mukti Khaire, who joined Cornell Tech as a professor of practice after teaching entrepreneurial management at Harvard Business School. “It’s about building things with multi-disciplinary teams, putting into practice the classroom instruction. That is the core part. It enables all of the students on campus to work really hard at building things and to learn the relevant soft skills to be really effective. This is the future of the workplace because problems will always have a better outcome when they are approached from different perspectives and expertise. The students here are a very special group of people who know the relevance and the importance of the digital economy.”
The Cornell Tech campus is the result of an idea hatched in the New York City’s mayor’s office in December of 2010 when a pair of senior aides to Mayor Mike Bloomberg came up with the idea as a way to jumpstart a broader diversity of economic activity in the city. With Wall Street and finance in a severe downturn due to the Great Recession, the feeling was that New York needed a world class university to be at the center of a tech ecosystem similar to Silicon Valley.
The Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City
The Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City
‘THE MBA PROGRAM WAS CONSISTENT WITH THE WHOLE CORNELL TECH VISION’
The city began a competition among universities and several, including Stanford University, tossed their hats into the ring. But ultimately Cornell University, in partnership with Israel’s Technicon, gained the rights to the land, and Cornell opened the doors to its new campus in September of this year.
Doug Stayman, associate dean of the Cornell Tech MBA program
“Right from the get go, part of the application to the city was that the business school would be part of the campus and that we would combine business school students with engineering and computer science students,” says Doug Stayman, associate dean of Cornell Tech. “We’ve since expanded that to include design and law. So the MBA program was consistent with the whole Cornell Tech vision.”
The program, however, also was designed to fulfil a need. Bain & Co. and Deloitte Consulting were enlisted to survey and speak with would-be applicants and employers. “Companies told us that they can hire technical people and they can hire business people,” recalls Stayman. “But the way digital is going is that people who span both fields are needed and they are difficult to find. So training people to bridge the business and technical was one very important insight from the market. The other was the importance of digital product management. That is the heart of Cornell Tech and the MBA program. We are trying to train students to not only understand business but to understand technology and technologists.”
WHAT THE MARKET RESEARCH SHOWED
The market research convinced Cornell that employers essentially wanted MBA graduates from an MBA program. “They wanted them to have the business fundamentals, leadership training and maturity,” says Stayman. “So we partnered with Cornell’s Johnson School to do the business basics in Ithaca over the summer. Then, we bring the students to the Cornell TEch campus in New York to learn about new business models and disruption. And the third part of the curriculum is bringing the MBA students in contact with students from the technical programs to design and build things.”
Given the tech focus, slightly over half of the students have technical backgrounds, with the remaining students non-technical. “The balance works well,” says Stayman. “You need a lot of technical expertise to build these products. There was pressure for the MBAs to do some of the coding and that is not what we want them to do. We want them to do product evaluation, strategy and the go-to-market plan.”
By creating the MBA program from scratch, the school didn’t have to deal with legacy issues of any kind where invested faculty might resist dramatic change. “The idea that we were going to have a practicum curriculum has never been debated or pushed back upon,” says Huttenlocher. MBAs still take the recognizable core classes, but we then took what normally would have been the free electives said that is going to be studio here. So we do have a much more rigid structure than comparable MBA programs elsewhere. There are very few free electrives but the benefit they get is this unmatched experience building products.”
‘THE GOAL OF THE CAMPUS IS TO BE VERY INVOLVED IN THE STARTUP SCENE’
Cornell Johnson Dean Mark Nelson
Mark Nelson, dean of Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, points out that the NYC campus was specifically built and designed for multi-disciplinary collaboration. “So the idea of the campus being something that was looked at as a clean slate is unique,” he says. “From a faculty perspective, it feels more like you are walking into a large tech firm. There are no private offices. The faculty are out in shared spaces, and the students work in open spaces, too.
“The goal of the campus is to be very involved in the startup scene in New York,” adds Nelson. So in the Tata Innovation Center, one of the initial four buildings on the Cornell Tech campus, the top three floors are actually leased to companies, including Citigroup and Cigna. “So those firms are part of the campus. Being part of that community is fundamental to the experience and to the vision that Mayor Bloomberg had when he launched this whole process.”
The first Cornell Tech MBA class of 39 students began three years ago in 2014 in Google’s New York headquarters building in Chelsea. With this fall’s opening of the Roosevelt Island campus, the school moved its newly entered fourth cohort of 62 students into the modern classrooms and studios in late August. That’s up from the 53 graduates of the program this past July. Within five years, predicts Nelson, the Cornell Tech MBA program–which currently has a tuition price tag of $98,940– could enroll as many as 175 students, nearly three times its current enrollment. That compares with with the 277 entering MBA students in Cornell Johnson’s two-year MBA program this year.
‘MBA STUDENTS LIVE, WORK AND STUDY TOGETHER WITH CLASSMATES FROM OTHER PROGRAMS’
The first two master’s programs at Cornell Tech were in business and computer science. Now the school has seven programs, including operations research, electrical and computer engineering, law and design, the latter a partnership with the Parsons School of Design. Another 50-50 partnership with Israel’s Technion runs what is called the Jacobs Institute which helps PhD students commercialize research, largely in healthcare tech and connective media.
“All of those students from all those programs do studio together and that is very important for the MBA studnets,” adds Stayman. “Think of any other MBA program in business. It will not only be in a business school, it will be in a separate physical building. At Cornell Tech, that is not true and that is what is unique. Students live, work and study together with classmates from all these programs. But we are an entreprenurial campus, not an entrepeurship campus. We want to change existng companies and not only do startups.”
For MBA student Vivian Ho, who lives in the newly erected residential hall on Roosevelt Island with other graduate students, the experience has been a true eye-opener. Her product team, composed of students in law, computer science and connected media, as well as another MBA with a background as an electrical engineer. They built an augmented reality application for SAP for students to study astronomy.
A ROUGH START FOR A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY TEAM LED TO POSITIVE EXPERIENCE
“In the beginning, my team had a little bit of a rough start because we were getting used to each other’s cultural norms,” she says. “But the process worked itself out. We pivoted our product at least four or five times and finally picked one we liked, During our final sprint to develop the product, the lawyer actually coded half the app. If you want to learn more about tech and you don’t have a strong background in tech this is a good opportunity to learn with a team that will support you.”
She has was surprised by the number of relationships that Cornell Tech has with New York City companies and organizations even though it has been in the city for four years. “We’ve had a lot of opportunities to work with these companies through the studio curriculum and a series of ‘studio conversations’ with industry leaders, she says, citing two examples including Apple’s chief diversity officer and the White House’s first digital officer.
If anything, Ho has found the classes so compelling that she wishes they could have been longer. “I have really been surprised at the pace of the program. It’s accelerated, but we still have to take the same number of credits as an MBA from the Johnson School. These classes have been really interesting and I wished they were longer.” When she graduates in May, she expects to return to Deloitte, transitioning from consulting for the government to focus more on innovative industries. She’ll be back with one of the most innovative and differentiated MBAs in the world, the 2017 MBA Program of the Year.
DON’T MISS: 2017 DEAN OF THE YEAR: KELLOGG’S SALLY BLOUNT
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