Neil Tarallo

Biography

Neil C. Tarallo is an associate teaching professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. For more than 25 years, he has helped organizations and individuals rethink growth, uncertainty and opportunity. He brings a rare blend of academic rigor and lived entrepreneurial experience to the classroom, teaching courses that build an innovation mindset grounded in creativity, resilience, adaptability and effectual reasoning.

Tarallo’s current work applies artificial intelligence to enhance how entrepreneurs, organizations and students identify market problems, generate insights and design solutions. He integrates AI into both teaching and practice, using it to expand creative capacity, strengthen decision making under uncertainty and accelerate the transformation of ideas into opportunities. Within Cornell’s executive education program, he helps leaders apply AI responsibly and effectively, embedding it into innovation, strategy and learning processes while maintaining the human judgment essential to sustainable growth.

An entrepreneur at heart, Tarallo has founded multiple businesses in the retail, service and investment sectors. Through Cornell’s executive education program, he has worked with executives, managers and entrepreneurs across five continents and more than 25 countries, including Fortune 100 and 500 companies in industries ranging from hospitality and retail to automotive and manufacturing. In these engagements, he helps organizations cultivate environments that encourage innovation, integrate emerging technologies and translate ideas into action.

Tarallo’s teaching philosophy centers on the belief that opportunity is created, not found. His frameworks — including the Multi Dimensional Compass, the NOVA U Framework and the Purposeful Growth Model — help people navigate complexity by balancing human, strategic and operational dimensions of growth. His recent book, The Purposeful Leader: How Multi Dimensional Thinking Shapes Leadership in a World That Won’t Sit Still, became an Amazon bestseller and is used by educators and executives worldwide for its practical, human centered approach to innovation and decision making.

At his core, Tarallo is an educator and entrepreneur who believes deeply in possibility. Whether in the classroom, on a factory floor or in a boardroom, he brings curiosity, humility and purpose to his work — and invites others to do the same.

Education

MBA Syracuse University, 1994
BS Ithaca College, 1982

Awards

• Boots to Business Instructor of the Year (2016) U.S. Small Business Administration
• NYS Venture Connect Campus Connector Award (nomination) (2015) New York State Venture Connect
• Syracuse University Meredith Teaching Award Nomination (2010) Syracuse University