Two Generations of Kaplans visit the new Kaplan Institute

CRAIN'S PIX of the New Kaplan Institute

Kaplan Institute - Grand Opening - Ribbon Cutting Remarks

Grand Opening Press Conference 

Remarks of Executive Director Howard Tullman

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I want to start by advising those of you sitting on the Pitch that your seat cushions can be used as flotation devices in the event of a water landing during our flight. All kidding aside, as we formally open the Kaplan Institute today, the flight imagery couldn’t be more appropriate.

This is a place originally envisioned by our past President John Anderson as a launching pad where our student entrepreneurs and innovators could have their ideas take shape, their businesses be born, and ultimately their dreams come true. Dreams aggressively driven by a concrete commitment to the hard and ceaseless work needed to change our communities, our city and the world for the better. The basic culture of Kaplan couldn’t be simpler or clearer: you don’t get what you wish for, you get what you work for.

Along with Presidents Anderson and Cramb, Ed Kaplan (and the many others who have helped to make their vision into a reality) imagined an interdisciplinary institute combining all the resources of the university in a single place that would help to more fully equip and enable our graduates to enter the working world with the skills and talents necessary to succeed tomorrow in an environment where the only constant is change. 

Besides a solid technical grounding, the critical skills for the “new collar” economy include effective communication, empathetic leadership, a tolerance for ambiguity and goalless planning, a digital-first mindset, and an appreciation for the criticality of human-centered design in all we do. This is why we are so excited to have the Institute of Design here as a major part of the Kaplan Institute. The possibilities for collaboration, interactions, and serendipity are endless. And I want to acknowledge Vic Morgenstern’s extraordinary contributions in making ID’s return to the main campus a reality.

The vexing challenges of the future won’t be neatly packaged or suitable for silos; they will demand cross-disciplinary skills and team-based solutions that extinguish the boundaries between many disciplines and combine the best thinking and strategies of our students and faculty into unique and game-changing solutions.

One thing we know for sure is that no one today does anything important all by themselves. I’m proud to be building a new team here at KI including my Deputy Director Barbara Pollack and Jeremy Alexis who will head up our new, re-imagined and reinvigorated iPRO programs. We’re excited that Kaplan (working closely with faculty and students from our Engineering school) will host some of the exciting new VR visualization and planning technologies developed by Dassault Systemes of France – one of our newest corporate partners – and that we will be providing new Magic Leap MR equipment to our students as well thru our ongoing work with AT&T.

The broad and exciting projects we will undertake here (with the support and enthusiastic engagement of both our best faculty and our many business and industry partners) will help us address the serious needs, critical concerns, and enormous challenges ahead for all of us at a time where we‘re surrounded by both instances of enormous abundance and of shocking scarcity – often within the same communities – and at the same time.

Charity, compassion and kindness will help us solve some of these inequities, but ultimately only education and technology will provide the paths forward to real change and access for all to the opportunities that the most fortunate of us see all around. Part of the mission of Kaplan besides educating our own students is to reach out to the communities that surround us and help lift them (and especially their youth) up as well.

This is why we’re so excited to be partnering with several CPS schools including the Dyett High School for the Arts and with the talented engineering teams from Softbank Robotics to expand and offer some of our KI robotics programs to their students. 

Talent is everywhere in our great city, but opportunity and access to crucial resources doesn’t happen by itself. We need to make it happen and we need all of you to help.  

   

And speaking of help, let me introduce two of our newest Kaplan team members from Softbank Robotics. Pepper – can you give us a hand? 

Pepper:

Hello everyone. And thank you Howard! It is great to be here for the opening of the Kaplan Institute. I’m very excited about my new role here. It will be great working with the students to help everyone have a better understanding of robotics.

Howard:
Excellent. Welcome to the team Pepper.

Pepper:

I’m also excited to take my talents to the Chicago Public Schools to help inspire more children to explore science, technology, and other STEM fields.

Howard: That’s great Pepper. Speaking of excitement, let’s cut the ribbon so we can officially open the doors. Can we get some help?


Pepper: Sure Howard. We’re more than happy to help out. (Ribbon is cut, and Pepper claps hands.)

Chicago Innovation UnGala Hall of Fame Awards

New Interview - Frank Fontana Interviews Howard Tullman on the new Kaplan Institute

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LINK TO VIDEO: https://youtu.be/S6RaroNCdJw

John Pletz: Tullman to lead Illinois Tech's Kaplan Institute

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180416/BLOGS11/180419914/tullman-to-lead-illinois-techs-kaplan-institute

Tullman to lead Illinois Tech's Kaplan Institute

John Pletz on Tech

April 16, 2018

Howard Tullman

You knew Howard Tullman wasn't going to sit still for long after leaving 1871. The veteran entrepreneur who has dabbled in tech and education for several decades, is heading south to Bronzeville, where he's going to launch a new innovation and entrepreneurship center at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Tullman, 72, takes over as executive director of the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship on May 1. The 70,000-square-foot center on the school's main campus will be completed in October.

"Howard is the perfect person to launch the Kaplan Institute," said Alan Cramb, president of Illinois Tech. "We've known Howard for a number of years. A number of trustees said we should hire him."

Tullman ran 1871, the city's well-known tech incubator at the Merchandise Mart, for the past four years, stepping down as CEO earlier this month. He previously launched several tech companies, including CCC Information Services, before turning around Kendall College and then launching Tribeca Flashpoint College, a for-profit digital media school. He's also a longtime investor in tech startups.

"I'm excited," Tullman said of the new job. "It's a total greenfield."

The institute, which is still under construction, is named for Ed Kaplan, founder of Zebra Technologies, one of the Chicago area's early publicly traded technology companies, who got his undergraduate degree at Illinois Tech. A member of the institute's board, he and his wife donated $11 million to get the project rolling. Kaplan went on to earn an MBA from the University of Chicago, where he also is​ launched the school's business-plan competition, the New Venture Challenge.

Cramb says the Kaplan Institute isn't an incubator. The university already has one of those. It will be a 24-hour facility that will house a maker lab and other services, as well as the school's Institute of Design. "We'll be happy if companies form, but it's not the primary mission," Cramb said. "We want to set up a culture that values and encourages creativity, one that leads to innovation among our students and faculty. We want to make sure undergrads understand entrepreneurship and innovation and creativity."

Illinois Tech, which has 4,600 graduate students and 2,700 undergrads, is well-known for its engineering and computer science programs, as well as its architecture school. "It's an interesting school," Tullman said in an interview. "It's left-brain, right-brain."

The aim of the Kaplan Institute is to give Illinois Tech students a place to design, build and collaborate. Universities are scrambling to give students training and opportunities in entrepreneurship, especially in fast-changing professional world in which traditional careers are less available and less desirable to many students.

It's a homecoming of sorts for Tullman. Although he got his undergraduate and law degrees from Northwestern University, Tullman took his first college class, a programming course, at IIT, as it was known then, in 1963 while he was still in high school. He'll also be a professor and commencement speaker next month. Tullman's goals extend well beyond the South Side campus.

"This school has more of these first-generation success stories than any other place. The trick is: how can you make them entrepreneurial, as well?" he told me. "If you can be a pipeline for graduates in engineering and computer science with entrepreneurial skills—and feed them into corporations here, the city will take another step forward. It's ridiculous more people don't understand that you have this resource that turns out amazing graduates. I plan to fix that."

No one ever accused Tullman of thinking small.

NVC JUDGING COMPETITION AT BOOTH