NEW YORK CITY – The idea is grand: get the government to invest, really invest, in a blend of innovative education and technology for a long-term play to create good-paying jobs and a center to spin out a continuous set of new ideas, new companies, and, yes, more new jobs.

The execution obviously can be more complicated. But to those who are watching, just that proposition as it unfolds on a 12-acre swatch of New York City’s Roosevelt Island, there seems no holding back on unabashed optimism.

The idea hatched four years ago with a competition set up by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg for a consortium that would deliver. The smoke cleared a year later, and the winners of a city grant of land and a $100 million city investment seed money went to Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, among 18 candidates worldwide.

Their joint proposal, which Bloomberg said at the time was “far and away the boldest and most ambitious” proposal in the competition, was to create a campus that would collaborate with businesses to spin out a continuous series of ideas, start-ups and applied science and engineering leaders who could keep up with the demanding pace of digital development.

Cornell is an Ivy League school that is a state land grant university, which means it has an academic lean towards practical studies. Technion graduates represent the vast majority of Israeli founders and managers in high tech, and Israel is home to the largest concentration of high-tech start-ups outside of Silicon Valley.

Though much of this is still developing, areas of focus include projects concerning further inter-connecting media or new platforms, models and use of data; health and technology, from health care to information systems about health care, and design and the sustainability of urban environments, including energy and transportation systems.

The school’s website already says student projects this fall involve partnerships with 16 companies.

Along the way, there is much discussion about design of their eventual buildings, experimentation in education approaches, adoption of academic approaches based more on business drivers than traditional academic boundaries, and the introduction of commercial models to monetize intellectual property. And jobs.

In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Don Huttenlocher, the dean, described the problem of creating a new institution about constant change with tools and designs that will not be immediately seen as outdated or inflexible.

So where are they now?

Stressing the long-term
Cornell is stressing the long-term part of long-term development. Cornell plans to open its first buildings in 2017 and its last some 20 years later.

Roosevelt Island is in the middle of the East River, built up for residential use, and accessible mostly by a single subway line and a tram that runs from the Manhattan’s Second Avenue.

Almost under the 59th Street bridge (now called the Ed Koch Bridge) is a construction site, where the Goldwater Memorial Hospital is to be demolished, which created a stir four years ago because it required relocation of scores of disabled residential patients to sites around the city.

Cornell is also finding challenge in preserving three rare 7-foot-by-50-foot murals from the former hospital created as W.P.A. projects in the early 1940s, two of which had apparently been painted over.

Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital was a 2,016-bed, chronic-care facility formed by the 1996 merger of two hospitals that provided services such as rehabilitation and specialty nursing.

Goldwater Memorial, named for a city hospitals commissioner, opened in 1939 as the Welfare Hospital for Chronic Disease on 9.9 acres of city land, just south of the bridge. Plans to close the hospital and relocate the patients were announced in 2010. The hospital closed on Dec. 31, 2013, and demolition started the following month. There are no plans to close the northern Coler facility

What is envisioned is a 2-billion-square-foot facility housing 2,000 students, nearly 300 professors, who together would encompass a Silicon Valley East incubator.

The early months also saw protests aimed at Cornell’s partner, Technion, over Middle East politics and the company’s role in support for Israeli policies affecting Palestinians.

In a variety of interviews and Cornell websites, project leaders have described approaches to make the actual construction, once it gets going, to be extremely flexible and to represent the kind of sustainability that the overall mission will try to instill in graduate student programs.

As examples, the first buildings planned include a fully automated, open-design academic building, a residential tower, and a building for industry partners. The open design means large, uninterrupted spaces, with the thought of temporary areas set up for individual projects. There will be no data center. Industry partners will provide cloud-computing capabilities. There will be classroom education gadgets, but they may be ever-changing gadgets.

Temporary digs
For now, Cornell Tech has eight classrooms in the building used by Google on Eighth Avenue in the Chelsea neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan, occupying a full city block. The building was once Inland Terminal 1 of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

There are more than 20 faculty members. Students do take classes with emphases on engineering suitability and user interface development. These are classes that start with how-to, not with what.

The new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has not weighed in publicly on the project, but Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, who oversees economic development and housing strategy, did note in a recent press conference that city administration has been looking elsewhere for pillars of city development strategy – affordable housing, pre-K education programs and a recent call to overhaul workforce development.

She applauded the Bloomberg administration’s backing for looking at applied sciences and technology, but indicated that current thinking “is on nurturing and growing our own (city-based) workforce.”

This is not to say that the city is the only source of money for Cornell Tech. Last year, Irwin Mark Jacobs, founding chairman and former CEO of Qualcomm, and his wife announced a $133 million gift to Cornell and Technion towards a named Institute. Plus Cornell and Technion are clearly both contributing money as well as thinking to the project.

The mark of progress, and eventually jobs, undoubtedly will emerge from the projects themselves. As outlined on the Cornell Tech website, students match with local tech organizations – startups or larger companies or nonprofits - to complete semester-long projects. These organizations propose relevant projects.

One highlighted practical project: a solution to pay the dinner tab at a restaurant instantly rather than waiting for a check and transactions. Two students have a project to pay by smart phone while avoiding the process of dividing the bill, calculating a tip and dealing with credit card paperwork. The program, called “juju,’’ also incorporates coupons and customer surveys as a benefit to the restaurant and diner for future visits.

Healthier Life?
The Healthier Life program will aim to provide tools and advances in both heath care and in managing information about health.

The website describes the process: “Insights from data are helping individuals and health care professionals understand, prevent and manage disease, fueling advances in clinical decision making and health behavior. Offered by the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, the Healthier Life experience can help you lead innovation in mobile and wearable tech, machine learning, security, user interaction and more.”

Deborah Estin, founder of the Healthier Life program, said: “The health care industry is one of the most complicated and complex to navigate as an innovator and entrepreneur. There is a large gap in knowledge and experience between health care professionals and technologists. Students in the Healthier Life program will learn how to design new technologies tailored for the context of health care.”

Terry Schwadron is longtime writer and editor for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Providence Journal. He left The Times as a senior editor to work a variety of writing and music projects.