Entrepreneurship in the College of Arts & Sciences
The College of Arts & Sciences supports faculty and staff who follow their curiosities in their research, scholarship and creative works. These innovations, creations and discoveries often have applications in various fields, leading to patents, plays, products and other entrepreneurial ventures. The college celebrates these accomplishments.
Our students are also entrepreneurial, creating businesses and social enterprises, taking entrepreneurship classes and participating in hackathons and business competitions. The college is always well represented among teams that are accepted into the eLab student business accelerator (16 of the 26 undergrads in the 2020-21 cohort were from A&S) and the yearly Big Idea Competition.
And, last but far from least, alumni from the College are leading the way in countless organizations and companies, in areas ranging from drug development to battery technology to food products and application design. Cornell’s Entrepreneur of the Year is often an Arts & Sciences alum.
Faculty entrepreneurs
Our labs and classrooms are full of innovation, and not only in the hard sciences. Our social scientists and humanists are also finding ways for their research to be turned into applications that benefit the world.
“The surprising thing about starting a company is how much it feels like a continuation of my research. If we reach out to someone who might be a potential client, we want to learn from them. If it turns into a partnership, great. If not, we’ve had an engaging conversation.”
The classes that I took that had people from all walks of life — athletes, engineers, economists, data scientists. I learned how you could bring those people together to do group projects and build an interdisciplinary team that’s appreciative of everyone’s strength and interests.
Carolyn Witte ’12, co-founder, Tia, pictured here on the right with her co-founder Felicity Yost '12
What will the currency be in space? How can humans deal with climate issues in space? How will we store and manage power in space? I’d like to work to find a way to fund and commercialize those developments and develop incentive structures to make that happen.
Ben Shapiro ’22, a member of the Space Systems Design Studio working on a spacecraft they will deploy as part of Cornell’s αlpha CubeSat Mission
