On‑Campus Capstone – Advanced Hospitality

Strategy Capstone

Neil Tarallo is a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. He currently serves as the director of the Cornell University Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Disabled Veterans (EBV), which offers entrepreneurship education to post 9/11 veterans and as the director (interim) of the Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship. He has also served as the curriculum lead and co-PI for the U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Veteran Business Development’s boots2business program.

As an entrepreneur, Tarallo has owned and operated companies in the fields of photographic retail and quick printing. He has also purchased, rehabilitated, and sold numerous businesses. Tarallo currently has an active consulting practice as well a commercial real estate development and management company. He is also member of a venture capital partnership and an active angel investor.

A seasoned active entrepreneur, academic, and consultant with a proven track record of bringing real world experiences to students, veterans, and corporate/non-profit clients internationally in the classroom, online, and through seminars.

”I teach and have created a broad spectrum of entrepreneurship courses for delivery in the classroom and online with significant experience developing academic entrepreneurship programs, including centers and institutes, dating back to 1994. Teaching experiences in Djibouti (Africa), South Africa, Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan have given me the opportunity to observe entrepreneurship in cultures and economies outside of the United States. These experiences have broadened my entrepreneurial repertoire in the classroom and in consulting engagements.

These experiences have also helped me to understand the importance of aggregating theory and practice in the classroom. I have found that by designing a curriculum rich in experiential learning opportunities and engaging students in a real world application of knowledge, I am able to provide a more impactful learning experience that will also translate into their professional lives.

Along the way I have developed expertise in establishing entrepreneurial behavior, culture, mindset, and structure for existing corporations/organizations with over 20 years’ experience applying these skills in corporate and academic environments as an entrepreneur and consultant. When I am not teaching, I work with corporations and non-profits to help them create new markets through value proposition design, customer experience mapping, and business model evolution.”

Steven Carvell joined the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration’s finance faculty in 1986 and is currently a Professor of Finance in the SC Johnson College of Business. Over the past 33 years, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses such as “Advanced Corporate Finance,” “Capital Budgeting,” “Financial Strategy,” and “Investments.” Dr, Carvell has also been an active teacher in executive education since 1990, working with almost every major domestic and international hotel company to create custom courses for hotel executives with companies like Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental Hotel Group, Taj Hotels, Jumeirah, Accor, Sol Melia, Le Meridien, Shangri La, and Peninsula. Dr. Carvell has also authored eight distance-learning courses through eCornell that are among the most widely demanded courses offered. He has held academic leadership positions at the School of Hotel Administration since 1999, serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2007 to 2016 and the Academic Director of the Pillsbury Institute for Entrepreneurship from 2013 to 2016

Dr.  Carvell has published numerous articles in academic and professional journals including the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, the Harvard Business Review, and the Cornell Quarterly, and he is the co-author of “In the Shadows of Wall Street.” His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Institutional Investor, Financial World, and Leaders. Dr. Carvell has recently finished a major project designed to identify the determinants of hotel demand for U.S. hotels and another on economic and capital market antecedents of venture capital commitments. He is currently working on a project to disaggregate hotel room rates within urban markets and another to determine the risk-return characteristics of hotel room rates in major U.S. markets.  Dr. Carvell is also involved with evaluating the effectiveness of hotel company business strategies using strategic benchmarking and economic value-added analysis.

Dr. Carvell has worked for professional money managers in the area of applied strategy in the equity market and served as a consultant to the Presidential Commission on the 1987 stock market crash. His consulting interests include valuation and risk analysis in feasibility studies, hotel debt capacity, strategic benchmarking, and corporate and financial strategy.