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Less than a year away from the opening of a $2 billion campus on Roosevelt Island, Cornell University has shifted its academic course for the satellite to more student-driven technology development.
The change has come about after the initial curriculum was laid out five years ago, said Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech.
“Almost everything we did in that first year looks sort of embarrassingly naive in retrospect,” Dr. Huttenlocher said in an interview.
Cornell Tech’s 29 faculty members, many hailing from companies like Yahoo, Twitter and Google, took the unusual step to hastily replace and adjust programs based off of student feedback.
Today, Cornell Tech is having companies present dilemmas and asking students to develop products to solve them. The school had been tasking students to develop specific features for products that the companies had already envisioned.
The satellite’s 200 students now spend a third of their time developing technologies for companies, nonprofits and government agencies. They are based in the Google building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood until students move in next summer on Roosevelt Island, in the East River just off Manhattan. Cornell Tech offers six master’s programs, including M.B.A.s, law and computer-science degrees, as well doctorates in computer and information science, electrical and computer engineering and operations research.
Similar to how technology startups quickly get prototypes to customers for feedback, Dr. Huttenlocher wanted students to have a say right away on their school. To do that, he put a system in place to solicit feedback from both students and faculty members.
At what Cornell Tech calls “postmortems,” essentially town hall meetings, students are encouraged to critique everything from teaching methods to school initiatives.
One of the first casualties of the postmortems was an initiative called “The Entrepreneurial Intensive,” which called for small groups of M.B.A. and computer-science students to develop a technology or product in 10 days of 12-hour sessions. They then had to show mock-ups of the prototypes to New Yorkers on the street.
“It was a disaster. Nothing short of disaster,” Dr. Huttenlocher said. “It sounded like such a good idea at the time.”
By starting the year with the initiative, students said they didn’t know what to expect for the rest of the year. Plus, Mr. Huttenlocher said, the concept didn’t account for social dynamics.
“The engineers by and large think that the M.B.A.s are idiots and can’t possibly add any value because the problems are all technical,” Dr. Huttenlocher said. “And the M.B.A.s think, ‘I’m the manager here. Do what I tell you.’ ”
To address the students’ concerns, the faculty created an algorithm to match students based on their background, shortened the sessions and extended the program all year.
The problem-solving that students are doing is getting a thumbs-up from companies.
Splash, an event-marketing company led by Chief Executive Ben Hindman, told a group of students that it wanted a product that could detect the sentiments of crowds.
The group, which included Ian Folau, developed software that sent alerts to event planners when their customers posted negative tweets.
“We got an outside perspective on a product road map,” said Mr. Hindman. “We likely would not have prioritized that feature, but after seeing it, it became clear that it was a real need.”
Mr. Folau, who graduated last May, said he participated in several postmortems. He and other students pointed out that Cornell Tech had business and engineer students but no designers. Now, Cornell Tech invites students from Parsons School of Design to collaborate with their students.
Faculty members also encouraged changes.
Deborah Estrin, an associate dean and professor of computer science, was frustrated that faculty didn’t have the opportunity to test their research in the field. In response, Cornell Tech hired web-developers and designers to build products to test the research.
“It’s definitely not the pace you would typically see at academia,” Mr. Folau said. “They found a way to adapt [the curriculum] in a very fast pace, and I think the school and the product development is better for it.”
Corrections & Amplifications:
Splash is an event-marketing company that told a group of students it wanted a product that could detect the sentiments of crowds. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave the company’s name as Spash.
Write to Zolan Kanno-Youngs at Zolan.Kanno-Youngs@wsj.com
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