The Blackstone LaunchPad partners with CCNY

The Blackstone Charitable Foundation and The City College of New York partner for the Blackstone LaunchPad Program, which makes entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills accessible and relevant for all college students to help them build thriving companies and careers. The partnership will expand and strengthen three initiatives already underway through intense mentorship, community engagement and hands-on entrepreneurship programs designed to build upon CCNY’s almost 175-year history.

The initiatives will include the Zahn Innovation Center at CCNY (ZIC), the new Center for Innovation in Medical Technology (CIMT)—which builds on the existing Master’s in Translational Medicine, and a new course in social equity that The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership has developed for the spring 2021 semester.

"In making this grant, Blackstone clearly recognizes that a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation work on campuses like ours tend towards balkanization, because they often derive from the grant making efforts of individuals who are unconnected to one another,” said CCNY President Vincent Boudreau. “CCNY has many generously funded initiatives, but we've lacked the means to pull them together into a true innovation ecosystem.  Blackstone gives us the support, and the impetus, to undertake that coordination work, and I expect our innovation activity to truly take off in consequence.  We are deeply grateful and truly excited at what this support will allow us to accomplish."

The Zahn Center is a startup incubator offering co-working space and an array of resources, including annual entrepreneurship competitions, a startup boot camp, mentorship and pro-bono services, networking opportunities and rapid prototyping facilities. Students nurture and strategically develop solutions to enhance their critical thinking through mentorship and support across all eight City College divisions and schools. 

The Center for Innovation in Medical Technology is conceived as a product accelerator where teams of fellows and interns, under the supervision of product development professionals, gain real world work experience in developing solutions for important unmet biomedical needs. The primary feeder program for CIMT Fellows will be the existing Master’s in Translational Medicine, an academic program where students learn fundamental product development skills. 

The Colin Powell School’s new course focuses on social equity and entrepreneurship, and it will engage students to solve real world problems through project work supported by mentors—with a background in finance, marketing, capital markets, nonprofits and entrepreneurship—who provide insight to the scope of their operations and expertise.

About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.