New York City has boasted a healthy tech presence for several years, with more and more entrepreneurs (including Portfolio authors like Jason Baptiste, Aaron Shapiro, and Jonathan Fields) opting to launch their startups in Gotham instead of California’s Silicon Valley. In an effort to promote this booming sector, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Monday that Cornell University, in partnership with Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, will build a new applied sciences and engineering school on Roosevelt Island in the East River. The idea is to attract engineers, technicians, and other innovators to the region in the hope they will create more businesses and provide a boost to the economy. As Bloomberg put it:

It promises to create a beehive of innovation and discovery, attracting and nurturing the kind of technical talent that will spawn new companies, create new jobs and propel our city’s economy to new frontiers.

Others argue that it takes more than a university to create a hub for innovation. “A university by itself is not clear that it will transform New York into a more entrepreneurial dynamic place,” said Anna Lee-Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley. “After all, we have big famous engineering universities in Texas and California, in Europe, in Germany and England, that don’t have Silicon Valleys around them. So one single institution can’t be the story of Silicon Valley or of creating a new Silicon Valley.”

What do you think? Does NYC have what it takes to overtake Silicon Valley?

WNYC: New York City Takes on Silicon Valley

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