University of Toronto Opens Creative Destruction Lab in NYC

October 10, 2017

The University of Toronto’s awesomely-named Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) announced their first partnership outside of Canada.

New York University’s Stern School of Business will work with U of T to establish CDL New York City, based right in the heart of the metropolis. The Creative Destruction Lab is a seed-stage program inviting in massively-scalable science-based ventures. CDL NYC will begin accepting applications from early-stage science and tech startups on Jan. 1, 2018. Around 25 ventures will be admitted in the first year, starting in September.

The nine-month program will bring together three groups: successful entrepreneurs and investors, founders of pre-seed startups, and Stern faculty and MBA students. Companies selected for CDL NYC will benefit from intelligent business judgment, opportunities to raise capital, and guidance from the Lab’s chief scientists.

“Our model for developing massively scalable science-based ventures has proved successful in Canada,” says Ajay Agrawal, founder and academic director of the Creative Destruction Lab. “We anticipate it will be similarly successful for our partners at NYU.”

The CDL employs an objective-focused coaching process that helps new founders scale and commercialize their ideas. Experiential learning is paired with lessons from professionals in the field to create a unique opportunity to evaluate, finance and manage technology businesses.

CDL’s first location outside of Toronto opened in at the University of British Columbia in 2016, focusing on regenerative healing and biomed tech. Since then, there have been partnerships with schools from Calgary, Halifax and more.

Companies graduating from CDL over the past years include Thalmic Labs, Deep Genomics and Nymi. CDL graduates have created $1.4 billion in value over the past five years, according to Agrawal.

The lab continues to grow and expand its offerings, including a new program in Toronto geared towards startups in quantum machine learning. Just last week Sonia Sennik was named as CDL’s inaugural executive director.