The next engineering school in New York City could be a satellite campus of a university in Finland, South Korea or California, judging by the responses city officials received to their call for ideas on how to raise New York’s profile in the realm of technological innovation.
On Thursday, the city announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest in establishing a research center from universities and corporations around the world. Struggling to compete with Silicon Valley, Boston and other high-tech hubs, officials charged with developing the city’s economy have identified several city-owned sites that might serve as a home for the research center for applied science and engineering that they hope to establish.
The list of institutions that responded includes the Abo Akademi University in Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, as well as schools in England, India and Switzerland. American schools as far away as California and as close by as Manhattan and Hoboken, N.J., also indicated that they were interested.
A total of 27 schools responded, some teaming up with each other or with corporations to send joint submissions. One joint submission came from New York University, Carnegie Mellon University, the City University of New York, the University of Toronto and I.B.M.
“We received a response that was certainly equal to or exceeded our expectations,” said Robert K. Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development.
Mr. Steel said he and other city officials would study the responses, then solicit more concrete proposals in what would amount to a competition for a big — or bigger — presence in the city.
For sheer enthusiasm and ambition, it may prove difficult to match Stanford University, which has proposed building its first degree-granting satellite campus away from its home base in Palo Alto, Calif., said Lisa Lapin, a Stanford spokeswoman.
Stanford has suggested that it would revive the Goldwater Hospital campus on Roosevelt Island in the East River as an outpost that could eventually hold as many as 2,200 students and a few hundred faculty and staff members.
Stanford estimates that the initial phase of the campus, which could be completed by the end of 2015, would cost about $250 million. The university expects that its own spending would be supplemented by the city and philanthropists, Ms. Lapin said.
“It’s not about bringing money to the home campus,” Stanford’s president, John L. Hennessy, said in a recent interview. “It will require an investment of institutional resources to be successful.”
City officials did not reveal any more details of the responses, which they said included proposals for “hundreds of millions of dollars” of private investment.
So far, city officials have not said how much they would be willing to spend on the project, but they have identified four sites that the city might be willing to make available to the winning bidder. Along with the old hospital site on the southern end of Roosevelt Island, they include space on Governors Island in New York Harbor and complexes of buildings at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Staten Island.
Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, said that the respondents had expressed interest in all of the sites. Mr. Pinsky said he expected the development corporation to release a request for proposals, the second of two steps in the solicitation process, in the middle of the year. But he said officials had not decided whether bidding would be limited to the first respondents.
“We set a very ambitious goal out there,” Mr. Pinsky said. “And from a preliminary look, it appears that these are serious proposals with sweeping ambitions.”
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