Stanford to teach entrepreneurship in New York City

Stanford GSB is to enter the increasingly competitive New York market for training the city’s budding entrepreneurs, with the launch of its Stanford Ignite programme in March 2015. The programme, first taught on the Stanford campus in California in 2006, is now also taught in India, France, China and Chile.

Not only will the launch pitch Stanford in direct competition with top local business schools Columbia and NYU Stern, but also with the Cornell Tech, the multi-billion-dollar high-tech university being built on Roosevelt Island in New York.

Cornell Tech beat Stanford University in the bid to establish a campus on Roosevelt Island in 2012. The project was the brainchild of former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who wanted to boost the creation of digital age industry in New York following the financial crisis.

Stanford’s New York programme will use distance learning technologies to help entrepreneurs formulate, develop and commercialise their ideas. The non-degree programme is designed for working managers that want to set up their own companies or innovate within larger institutions, says Yossi Feinberg, the Stanford economics professor who runs the programme. “It provides graduate students, innovators, scientists and engineers from leading companies the essential toolset for creating impactful ventures.”

The certificate programme, which will run from March to May with up to 50 participants, will be taught in midtown New York - the exact loation is yet to be announced. Other Stanford Ignite programmes run outside Silicon Valley have been taught in collaboration with high-tech companies – Infosys in Bangalore, Cisco in Paris, and Microsoft in Santiago.