Howard A. Tullman Offers His Vision for Illinois Tech’s New Innovation Hub
Kaplan Institute Will Prepare Students to Think Like Entrepreneurs
TRANSCRIPT
My name is Howard Tullman, and I’m the new executive director of the Kaplan Institute, which is going to be all about innovation and a resource for all of the students on campus.
I’m mostly interested in terms of business innovation, and so business innovation means to me improvements in processes and systems that create new value. And for years this has been an area that I particularly focused on, and I’m really interested in bringing those kinds of ideas along with entrepreneurial ideas to the students at IIT.
In terms of the way I see the Kaplan Institute going forward and sort of the idea, and this grows in part from the thinking of Ed Kaplan, who was really one of the principal drivers of the creation of the institute. But the thought is that we’re training terrific engineers, now we want to make them entrepreneurial.
Not everybody is going to be an entrepreneur when they grow up, if you will, but they’re all going to have to be entrepreneurial, which means innovative and resourceful and disruptive. And so to create a center where all of the students are going to have access to new kinds of thinking to new kinds of tools and systems and technologies, and be trained to be entrepreneurs, I think it’s just going to make them better job candidates, better employees, and also a portion of them will bring about and create new businesses. And all of that is designed to improve and to continue to build the tech economy of the city.
