YU Innovation Lab Celebrates 2nd Birthday

Since our launch in the spring 2019 — and only accelerating across the upside down of global pandemic — we have worked with over fifty startups, across almost every imaginable category. From cyber tech to ad tech, on-demand transportation to early childhood education, medical devices to AI-fueled learning tools — our students, interns and instructor consultants have added immensities of value to these startups and their go-to-market acceleration.

As one of the consultant professors integrating our pipeline of selected startups into YU courses, one of my favorite highlights was working with Sightbit, a unique company offering AI-enhanced life-guarding systems.We initially integrated their brief as a market research project within one of our digital marketing master’s courses at Katz. Then, we integrated their brief for early pilot identification and recruitment within last summer’s Consulting Force program. I’ll let Dr. Blekher describe what happened next.

“Towards the end of last year, I received a note from the marketing VP on Sighbit’s executive team. It’s worth quoting her short, heartfelt note in full–‘Dear Maria — We are so grateful for the big push forward you gave us, and I wanted to share some good news with you — we got funding! Thank you for everything, Maria — we feel that the Lab helped us get here.’”

Along with every other academic institution and business on the planet, the global pandemic sparked massive disruption to our plans. But not, as it turned out, to our progress. Barely eight months after our founding we moved our Innovation Lab programs, events and startup course integrations seamlessly online. Based upon the end of semester results in May 2020 we can say we not only didn’t miss a beat, but accelerated several of our new business partnerships beyond even their founders’ wildest expectations.

It was then Sy Syms Business School Dean Noam Wasserman, one of the key YU leaders helping drive the Lab’s success suggested the Innovation Lab co-produce what would become a wildly successful program — the YU Consulting Force / Innovation Lab internship program. Working with fellow entrepreneurial academics from the Sy Syms School, Deans Wasserman, Dr. Blekher and I teamed with consulting leads from Accenture, McKinsey and other management consultancies to design, produce and run a one-of-a-kind consulting bootcamp across eight extremely accelerated weeks in the summer of 2020.

The progress made over the past two years has been impressive by any measure, especially the two that matter the most — student learning outcomes and startup business value. From a handful of initial companies, we’ve been able to drive significant growth in the number of startups we’ve partnered with, the number of students doing projects for those companies, and even in the impact of those projects on the startups’ trajectories.

Dr. Blekher agrees. “We’ve partnered with some of the prominent incubators and business accelerators in Israel to help bring some of their hottest new businesses to the North American market through our Innovation Lab here in New York. We’ve begun to diversify our startup partner pipeline, working with companies as near as New Jersey and as far as Argentina. To Dean Wasserman’s point, we want to increase the types of businesses we work with as well as diversify their home markets. One of the most exciting programs we’re just starting to work on is integrating local businesses from our Washington Heights neighborhood into the Innovation Lab in Fall 2021. The potential for being able to not just give back, but to grow and accelerate together with our business neighbors is extremely gratifying.”

As Dean Wasserman likes to remind us, entrepreneurship and innovation is now one of YU’s four major building blocks for the future. The pressure and the privilege is on Dr. Blekher, myself, our consulting professors and the ever-increasing cadres of Lab scholars to make the Innovation Lab the accelerating hub of those activities over the next two years and beyond.

For more information about the Lab, our programs, startups or consulting adjuncts, please feel free to reach me here or visit our website and LinkedIn page.