Dear Friends and Stakeholders of the YU Innovation Lab,

We hope you all continue to be well and artfully thriving amidst these uncharted times. Here’s our quarterly update from the YU Innovation Lab, and we invite you to reach out to us with yours…

The Summer Like No Other

This past spring as students at YU and all over the world began receiving the disappointing news that pandemic was cancelling their planned summer internships, Sy Syms Dean Noam Wasserman had an idea. …

Insights are scary

During a recent tour as strategy chief at a holding company agency here in New York, I was presenting a proposed strategy group work model to the senior team. About five minutes into the meeting the head of office asked me, “What do you see as the primary job of the strategy group here?” Without hesitance I said, “Insight — that’s our product.” The MD and his executive creative director both nodded warily in agreement. But a longtime VP of strategy from my team meekly coughed and said, “Actually, I don’t spend much of my time developing insights.”

Weirdly, we…

On May 27th our Founder and Director Dr. Maria Blekher and Innovation Lab professor consultant Thom Kennon presented a webinar on using the deep listening research method to mine fresh insights.

Here’s the vidcap of our webinar. We invite you to email the Innovation Lab’s Director Dr. Maria Blekher to arrange for a deep listening clinic customized to your business, brand, organization fund or school.

Dear Friends and Stakeholders of YU Innovation Lab,

One year ago this month we cut the opening ribbon on the YU Innovation Lab, a bold experiment in a model we call academy-as-a-platform. It’s been an amazing year of 180+ students, 20+ startups and an expanding series of programs, projects and events.

Here’s our Dispatch №1 as both thank-you and update to our partners, founders, mentors, professors, students and colleagues who made it all possible.

What happened...

Delivered. As part of our integration with Sy Syms School of Business and Katz School of Science and Health, our student project teams developed…

“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” wrote the great Jewish New Yorker Fred Ebb in the lyrics to his and composer John Kander’s enduring theme song of this amazing city New York, New York. Having founded, grown, advised and worked with businesses here in the center of the global business universe, we wholeheartedly agree.

Many of the companies the Innovation Lab works with are Israeli startups, and each share one thing in common — they chose to launch into the US market by first clearing one of business’s highest bars, the“New York Test”.

In early 2020…

Innovation Inc.

Ever since the late Clay Christensen coined the phrase “disruptive innovation” (HBR homage piece here), startups and incumbents alike have battled to capture and consolidate market share leveraging the strategy. For a generation, business consultants, high profile VCs and rock-star founders have all credited innovation and disruption as the key drivers to business success.

But the connected if chaotic world of humans and brands has evolved in unimaginable ways since Dr. Christensen first identified his formula in 1997. The magnitude of change — technological, cultural, social and commercial — has affected every aspect of our lives from the…