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October 29, 2019

’Creativity + collaboration = innovation’

PHOTO | New Haven BIZ Tsai CITY’s Tully (left) and student entrepreneurs discuss the many dimensions of innovation Thursday at Yale.
By Michael C. Bingham

The Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) last week launched an online exhibition illustrating “Yale Innovation Remixed.”

Unveiled at a reception held Thursday at the Center for Science and Social Science Information (CSSSI) at Kline Biology Tower, the exhibition explores Tsai CITY programs alongside stories of Yale innovations that span time periods, focus areas and industries.

According to Tsai CITY Creative Director Laura Mitchell Tully, innovation is “approaching problem-solving with curiosity, creativity and commitment — creativity mixed with collaboration.”

But what about the “remixed” part? Tully defined that creative process as “taking different elements or ideas and finding new ways to combine them — creating something novel in the process.”

Four principal innovation areas Tsai CITY has focused on to date include food and society, the environment, health care and knowledge exchange.

As living, breathing examples of this process in action, four student entrepreneurs shared stories about the projects and ventures they are creating — and the processes helping to bring them to fruition.

Among them is Marina Marmolejo, a recent master’s of public health grad who is co-founder and executive director of DreamKit, a mobile app that helps homeless young  people access services, sustenance, safe spaces and, ultimately, employment opportunities.

Another is Melissa Mazzeo, a grad student at the School of Forestry & Environmental Science and the School of Management. Mazzeo is working to take an idea her mother created in their hometown of Easton, Mass. — a children’s clothing consignment business called Merry Go Rounds — and take it national. She hopes to expand the concept beyond bricks and mortar through the use of e-commerce as well as subscription boxes to recycle kids’ clothes.

By doing so Mazzeo hopes to animate a “circular economic model” for a commodity — children’s clothing — whose useful life typically far exceeds their utility to a single user (fast-growing kids). By doing so she also hopes to spawn more “environmentally conscious kids,” she says.

Founded in 2017 as a “new center of gravity” in support of Yale-based entrepreneurial activity,  Tsai CITY provides extracurricular programs, funding and mentorship to budding entrepreneurs at Yale College and Yale graduate and professional schools.

Its initiatives include a semester-long accelerator program plus a summer fellowship for entrepreneurs to advance promising new ventures to the funding stage. To date, Tsai CITY has “catalyzed” 259 projects, according to the group, engaging some 1,420 students.

The Innovation Remixed media exhibit featuring Tsai CITY is visible on the CSSSI media wall and open to the public and during normal business hours.  Information about the location and hours is available at https://csssi.yale.edu/.

 

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