While New Yorkers eagerly await Cornell University’s upcoming tech campus on Roosevelt Island, NYU is doing its part in expanding the city’s tech footprint.
According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, NYU’s Polytechnic Institute has announced plans to launch “a research center for wireless technologies in a further bid to bolster a technology hub in downtown Brooklyn.” The new research center, created through a partnership with Texas-based National Instruments Corp., will open this winter inside Brooklyn’s own “Tech Triangle” — the startup-heavy area formed by Downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and DUMBO.
Alexandria Sica, the executive director at the Dumbo Improvement District, says this initiative will “spark a whole new field of entrepreneurs” in the area. The research center’s founder and director, Theodore Rappaport, believes that NYU is ready for work in this field to expand rapidly:
NYU Poly has always had some good researchers in wireless. What we’re doing now is ramping it to critical mass and creating a new research environment.
More than anything else, moves like this one have the potential to grow New York’s talent pool — one of the city’s main barriers in competing with other tech hubs like Silicon Valley.
Beyond schools, the city itself has also recently played an important role in helping NY’s tech scene expand, with initiatives like the BigApps competition, an ambitious open data policy, the move to bring WiFi and cellular reception into subway stations, the city’s first green hackathon Reinvent Green, and the Made in NY Digital Map, which helps Tech Startups discover talent.
Featured Image: Ludovic Bertron