Fourteen teams of students are nearing the end of a five-week project development program with the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. Called the accelerator, the initiative helps students develop an early-stage idea into an organization or product and is open to Yale students of all levels.

As the 2018–2019 academic year — Tsai CITY’s second year —wrapped up in May, our team started working on a familiar project: creating our annual report. Annual reports serve many purposes, of course — they’re a key format for communicating an organization’s goals, work, and impact to a broad array of stakeholders.

Donning a jet-black virtual-reality headset, holding a joystick in each hand, Bobby Berry, the resident Innovation Fellow at Tsai CITY and the Center for Collaborative Arts & Media (CCAM), looked equal parts futuristic and ridiculous in the CCAM’s motion capture studio on a Saturday afternoon.

Tsai CITY’s fall 2019 Accelerator is up and running, helping 14 student teams take their ideas to the next level. The cohort, selected from across Yale’s campus, includes teams working on a wide range of ventures, nonprofits, and other initiatives — students are hard at work prototyping products, launching social movements, finding paths to scale for existing platforms, and more. Over the course of the semester, each team will receive $1000 in grant funding, connections to mentors and expert advice, and insights from a series of workshops and learning modules.

Developing key techniques for American agriculture and food production. Using the arts to drive dialogue on climate change. Putting patients at the center of healthcare decisions. Creating new forms of knowledge exchange, from the stage to Hollywood screens.

Phyllis Mugadza ’21 B.S. says she wasn’t entirely familiar with the U.S. college experience when attending high school in Zimbabwe, but when she learned about the Yale Young African Scholars (YYAS) program, she applied and was accepted.

“I think of innovation as shifts in perspective….There’s not just one way to innovate. Innovation comes out of all disciplines.”
Those were part of the remarks delivered by Tsai CITY executive director Clare Leinweber as she opened the Global Innovation Symposium on September 26.

2018-2019 was a year of major growth for Tsai CITY. We continued to build our presence across Yale’s campus, ultimately engaging over 10% of the student body — including students from all 14 of Yale’s undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. In the process, we opened conversations on diverse meanings and applications of innovation, forging creative partnerships with schools, cultural centers, and other campus organizations.

Starting this fall, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale is offering a series of courses called “Paper to Prototype: App Design Basics” meant to help students create mobile applications.