ABSTRACT
In December 2011, the then-mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, announced that Cornell University and Israel's Technion had jointly won a bid to build a new Institute of Technology on Manhattan's Roosevelt Island. The announcement and the preceding bidding process drew a lot of attention from media, politics, and academia alike: Bloomberg was heralded for his “bold vision” that promised to finally dissolve the city's longstanding stigma of offering an anemic, second-rate innovation environment. Cornell Tech was seen as a “game changer” that could “help dreamers and entrepreneurs from around the world come to New York and help us become the world's leading city for technological innovation” (Cornell Chronicle, 2011) and “positioning New York for 21st-century global supremacy” in the wake of the financial crisis (Bellafante, 2011). Seemingly overnight, the project attracted private donations on the order of half a billion dollars, adding to the precious land grant of prime New York real estate and a pledged total investment of $2 billion by the city and the state.
