When Daniel Huttenlocker returned to teach at Cornell in 2002 after a spell at a California start-up, he insisted on holding a joint appointment between his former department – computer science – and the Johnson school of business. “After working in a start-up, it felt very narrow to go back to just the computer science department,” he says.

So it is not surprising that he has been chosen as the dean and vice-provost of Cornell Tech, the multibillion-dollar high-tech university to be built on Roosevelt island in Manhattan, where business and technology professors will meet the digital-age industry of New York.

The project, the brainchild of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, will be instrumental in the renaissance of New York City following the financial crisis, says Soumitra Dutta, dean of the Johnson school. “Today it’s seen as the flagship project in New York. It’s the regeneration not of a region, but of a whole city’s economy.”