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1. Our MBAs didn’t just consult in Colombia — they soaked up Medellín’s history and arts scene at the striking Rafael Uribe Uribe Palace of Culture, a reminder that business is always rooted in people and place.
2. Business is booming: Undergraduate enrollments keep climbing, the Virani Undergraduate School of Business rests on decades of graduate-school excellence, and a new 112,000-square-foot building for undergrads and grad students is rising to match the momentum.
3. Peek inside Professor James Weston’s office: ring light, tea kettle, a photo of Sean Connery — and #2 pencils lodged in the ceiling tiles. Also, we have to mention his side hustle pressing limited-edition vinyl for Snoop Dogg, Wu-Tang Clan and Stevie Wonder.
4. Generative AI can boost workplace creativity — if you pair it with metacognitive habits like planning, monitoring and adapting. Tools matter; how you think while using them matters more.
5. Behind the curtain of the Rice Business Plan Competition: 550 applicants, 42 teams, 400 judges — and one team walking away with more than $900,000, the second-largest amount awarded to a single team in competition history.
6. Business minds in medicine: How our MD/MBAs are applying their business skills — and AI — to help solve healthcare challenges.
7. Turns out it’s never too late to get your MBA. Rodney Kroll ’22 shares his story on getting his degree after an already-successful career.
8. Missing your daily dose of Professor Stephen Zeff? Check out his great photos on the last page. 

Have a story idea to share? Write to me at maureen.harmon@rice.edu.

Happy reading!  

— Maureen  

Contributors

We asked, “What do you do when you're not working?”

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Dan Morrell

I coach my two children’s youth sports teams and play fundamentally sound — though not aesthetically pleasing — pick-up basketball.

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Weezie Mackey

In between assignments, I‘m getting my hands dirty in the garden, tackling house renovation projects and training two puppies.

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Helen Huneycutt

Outside of work, I love to bake (everything but cookies, which are my nemeses), spend time outdoors and act as mediator between our two cats and the houseplants.

When I talk with our students today about preparing for the future of business, one topic rises to the top again and again: artificial intelligence. AI is no longer a futuristic tool waiting on the horizon — it is here, transforming industries, reshaping job functions and changing the way leaders make decisions. As a business school, it’s our responsibility to not only keep pace with these changes but to help lead them.

I recently served on a panel of deans discussing the future of AI. I was able to talk a bit about what we can offer students at Rice Business. For our students, AI is more than a skill set to list on a resume; it is fast becoming a foundational competency. AI certainly has ethical concerns, but our goal is to show students how to use it as a supplementary tool, one that can enhance the way they think about an issue or one that can serve as a tireless tutor for their work, continually making them better thinkers, doers and leaders.

Our undergraduates have BUSI 233 (“GenAI For Business: Tools and Implementation”) to help students on an introductory level, but we are also offering graduate-level elective courses like “AI Tools for Business Decision Making,” with Piyush Anand, assistant professor of marketing, or “Introduction to Generative AI for Business Applications,” with Kathleen Perley, an instructor in management who is also serving as an adviser on AI initiatives at Rice Business. Whether you’re an aspiring marketer using machine learning to understand customer behavior, a finance professional applying predictive analytics or an entrepreneur leveraging generative AI to prototype new ideas, fluency in these technologies is no longer optional. We must prepare our graduates to work with AI — critically, ethically and creatively — rather than fear being replaced by it.

For our faculty, AI is both a challenge and an opportunity. It challenges us to rethink teaching methods in a world where students may come to class having already asked ChatGPT to analyze case studies. But it also opens new avenues for research — from modeling global supply chains more accurately to exploring how algorithms shape consumer trust. Importantly, it forces us to engage with pressing questions: How do we ensure AI is used responsibly? How do we guard against bias? How can technology serve human ingenuity rather than diminish it?

At Rice Business, we see AI as a catalyst for innovation in the classroom and the workplace. Our graduates won’t just be proficient in AI — they’ll be leaders in shaping how it is deployed across industries.

Business education has always been about preparing students to lead in uncertain times. Today, uncertainty often takes the form of rapid technological change.

But these shifts are less a threat than an invitation: an invitation to think bigger, move faster and lead more thoughtfully. 

— Peter

There is a broad trend in healthcare leadership — the growing recognition that clinical excellence alone isn’t enough to navigate modern medicine’s complex challenges. Artificial intelligence, physician burnout and financial sustainability aren‘t abstract policy debates for the doctors on the front lines. They’re daily realities shaping how care is delivered — and how patients experience medicine.

Rice Business has emerged as a natural hub for this evolution, positioned in the heart of the world’s largest medical center. The school’s dual-degree program, pairing the Rice MBA with a medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine, prepares future physician-leaders to tackle healthcare’s multifaceted problems from day one. Meanwhile, the proximity to the Texas Medical Center draws established physicians to Rice’s Executive MBA program, where they gain the business acumen to drive systemic change in their organizations. “Our alumni with MDs are uniquely positioned to help shape the future of healthcare,” says Shiva Sivaramakrishnan, academic director of healthcare programming and the Henry Gardiner Symonds professor in accounting at Rice Business. “They combine firsthand clinical experience with the big-picture strategic thinking needed to tackle systemic challenges facing healthcare — from financial sustainability to technological innovation and workforce well-being.”

Whether earned alongside medical training or years into practice, the MBA becomes a powerful lens for seeing healthcare not just as a calling, but as a complex system that can be redesigned, optimized and ultimately healed.

The AI Revolution: From Burden to Benefit

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When electronic medical records (EMRs) first rolled out, many physicians saw them as one more bureaucratic hurdle. “Despite physicians complaining about electronic medical records adding time and cognitive burdens, no doctor would choose to work without them,” says Dr. Anita Ying, EMBA ’13, vice president of ambulatory and revenue cycle medical operations at MD Anderson Cancer Center. 

Now, artificial intelligence is beginning to smooth out the rough edges. At MD Anderson, ambient listening technology automatically generates clinical notes from patient visits. “I can focus entirely on my patients,” Ying explains. “I still review and edit the draft, but the cognitive load is dramatically reduced.” Those notes simultaneously serve colleagues coordinating care, meet billing requirements and update patients through their online portal. 

Ying sees even broader potential: AI-powered tools could analyze events during a patient’s hospital stay to identify potential safety gaps for clinicians, while large language models could streamline back-office tasks like billing. Telemedicine, too, has reshaped care since COVID. Before the pandemic, virtual visits were rare. Today, 20% of MD Anderson’s outpatient appointments are remote, saving patients travel costs and time away from work. Still, Ying warns that without interstate licensure reform and more comprehensive reimbursement models, the promise of telemedicine will remain incomplete.

Burnout at a Breaking Point

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If AI offers hope, the human toll of modern healthcare remains sobering. Dr. Aparajitha K. Verma, EMBA ’18, medical director of quality and patient experience at UTHealth Houston Neurosciences, describes physician burnout as “a persistent, progressive crisis.” Causes range from endless administrative tasks to rigid schedules that leave no space for work-life balance.

Some solutions are technological — AI scribes that take notes, tools that triage inboxes. But Verma insists that technology alone isn’t enough. “There needs to be fundamental cultural and policy changes led by healthcare organizations,” she says. She argues for aligning incentives with physician values, shifting compensation from volume to value, investing in leadership pathways and offering mental health support without stigma. “The goal is to reconnect physicians with their original purpose,” she adds, “while providing the flexibility and support they need to thrive.”

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Dr. R. Jason Yong, MD/MBA ’08, chief of the Division of Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, echoes those concerns. He sees burnout as a form of “moral injury” — a widening gap between why physicians entered medicine and what their days actually look like. 

Here too, AI offers a counterweight. Machine learning can uncover treatment insights from vast datasets. More transparent approaches, such as relevance-based prediction models, show physicians how conclusions are reached — preserving both accuracy and trust. Chatbots and AI-driven intake systems can also streamline visits, allowing doctors to spend more meaningful time with patients. “If designed thoughtfully,” Yong stresses, “AI can help restore what drew many of us to medicine in the first place: caring for patients face-to-face.”

Access and Equity: The Upstream Challenge

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While technology and burnout capture headlines, Dr. Omar Matuk-Villazon, EMBA ’18, chief medical officer at Suvida Healthcare, sees a more fundamental crisis brewing. Physician shortages aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet — they’re reshaping who gets care and how. At Suvida, a value-based primary care organization serving Latino seniors, those shortages translate directly into health disparities.

“For these patients, a shortage doesn’t just mean waiting longer for an appointment,” Matuk- Villazon explains. “It can mean worsening chronic disease and unnecessary ER visits.” Language barriers, cultural mistrust and geographic isolation compound the problem. Rural hospital closures leave entire communities stranded, while emergency department overcrowding becomes “simply the downstream signal of upstream failure.” 

His Rice MBA training taught him to see these challenges structurally, not just clinically. “We cannot solve shortages with numbers alone,” he says. “We must redesign delivery — building team-based models where physicians, nurse practitioners and community health workers extend one another’s reach, supported by technology.” The vision goes beyond traditional brick-and-mortar thinking. 

“Access is no longer just about hospitals; it’s about continuity, cultural trust and the right care at the right time.”

For Matuk-Villazon, the business challenge is clear: aligning incentives so that equity becomes financially sustainable. “When we succeed, we create not just access, but equity — and that is the foundation for healthier communities.”

Dollars and Diagnosis: The Economic Tension

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Beyond technology and workforce well-being, the economics of healthcare threaten its foundation. “The biggest challenge in healthcare today is financial sustainability,” says Dr. Rupesh Nigam, EMBA ’23. Costs continue to rise faster than wages, leaving families vulnerable to debt and health systems under pressure. Even insured patients face medical bankruptcy. 

Nigam points to a deeper problem: healthcare is trapped between fee-for-service, which rewards volume, and value-based care, which rewards outcomes. The result is an unstable middle ground. “This tension makes it harder to plan, invest and deliver care efficiently,” he explains. The ripple effects are visible at the bedside: delayed discharges, fragmented coordination and avoidable readmissions — all costly, all corrosive to trust. 

For Nigam, sustainability depends on treating healthcare both as a service and as a business. “We need to simplify processes without sacrificing quality, use technology to reduce waste, and build stronger alignment among payers, providers and patients,” he says. Only then can financial reality and clinical mission converge.

Where Medicine Meets Management

Across these perspectives, one theme stands out: Technology alone won’t heal healthcare, but it can be a catalyst for change. AI can lighten documentation burdens, extend the reach of specialists through telemedicine and make visits more human. But unless health systems also reform outdated structures, invest in their people and reconcile competing payment models, progress will remain piecemeal. 

For physicians like Ying, Verma, Yong, Matuk-Villazon and Nigam, the vision is clear. Healthcare must evolve into a system where innovation, sustainability and humanity reinforce — rather than undermine — one another. That, they argue, is the prescription for a healthier future.

Hear more from Dr. Omar Matuk-Villazon ’18 on the “Owl Have You Know” podcast:
 

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Ramon Marquez '25 has been predicting what customers want since he was 5. His grandfather had a general store in the small border town of Zaragoza, Chihuahua, Mexico — the kind where customers would approach the counter and ask for items, which his grandfather would dutifully go and track down for them. Marquez would visit his grandfather’s store on weekends, helping work the register and grabbing items for customers. “One of the things that I loved the most was to guess what they were going to ask for,” he recalls. “It became this kind of game for me.”

It was a fortuitous first experience with retail; Marquez has since led a more than 30-year career at some of the world’s most famous retail brands. “If you look at what my role has been throughout my professional life, it has been to predict what people are going to buy,” he says.

After graduating from the University of Texas at El Paso — where he briefly ran a side business selling sweaters to his fellow students — he joined JCPenney to help open their Mexican division in the wake of NAFTA. Over the next 20 years, he would hold senior roles at Old Navy, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle and New York & Company — each one selected strategically. “I’ve always been very careful about picking who I work for,” he says. “At the beginning, it was JCPenney … but when I went to Old Navy, the idea was that I wanted to go into a fast-paced younger company that was in growth mode.” He joined when the brand had just 200 stores and left when it had ballooned to over 1,000.

Seven years ago, Marquez became the head of retail at Transformco — which manages Sears and Kmart, two of America’s iconic-but-struggling legacy retailers — taking on a job many industry insiders viewed as impossible: not just reviving the brands, but reimagining their future.

The jump to Sears and Kmart was not an obvious move for Marquez. “I went to the Kmart store on 34th Street [in New York City] in Penn Station … and I said, ‘There’s no one — no one — who can clean this up,’” he remembers. “And then I walked away.” But something pulled him back. “What if I am that person?” he asked himself. He joined the company just weeks before Kmart’s bankruptcy filing.

What followed was a crash course in chaos management. “I didn’t know if, in the wake of the bankruptcy, I was going to have to lay off 200 people or if we were even going to continue to operate,” he says. But what Marquez soon came to realize was that this role was no longer limited to being the guy who can correctly guess what the customer wants. His role was also to redefine the culture of the organization. “They hired me to be the leader of these people — and to pick up the pieces and push the company forward,” he says.

That required a mental pivot. “There’s an ego behind it, right? Because I refused to be the person that got left behind, just shutting things down.” 

Instead, he reframed the situation: “A turnaround,” he says, “is just a startup in disguise.”

That entrepreneurial mindset has defined Marquez’s approach.

The first thing he had to do was take an inventory. “We needed to understand what we are really good at, what our assets are and what our liabilities are,” he says. “Obviously you want to get rid of your liabilities as soon as possible. And then we needed to stay very clear on who the customer is and what opportunity we have with that customer. Because chasing a customer who has left and is not coming back is just not the right thing to do.”

He also had to learn to operate without the kind of available assets he had at his previous positions. “Scarcity breeds innovation,” he says. “I worked for companies that had it all … here, you have to think through it. But as long as you understand who your customer is … you’ll figure it out.”

In the early days there wasn’t much to work with — except, that is, for the stores’ existing real estate. “There are brands and partners that want to get into their real estate, but they don’t want to lease the entire store,” says Marquez. “So I partnered with them, and they would bring their product into my stores," Marquez says. “I didn’t have to spend the money on the inventory … and then we would split the commissions.”

He also introduced ready-to-assemble furniture in Sears locations. His team was skeptical at first. “They said, ‘This could not sell here,’” he says. “But it worked so well there that we actually brought it to the Kmart stores.”

As a manager, Marquez leaned into a leadership style that focused on building trust. “We’re a smaller team, more dynamic. We pick up the phone, and we have open communication,” he says. “I’m also in the stores all the time. I talk to sales associates, they pick up the phone, they email me.” When the pandemic hit, the company embraced remote work and created a more flexible team culture. “There’s a lot of trust among us,” he says.

Those open lines of communication have been critical to fostering innovation, says Marquez. 

“A lot of companies, when things are tough, the first thing that goes is the creativity. So a lot of the innovation just gets cut and everybody goes for the safe option — but is it the safe option that got you to where you are? It kind of works against you.”

Marquez also credits a new humility in helping him lead innovation at the stores, which includes keeping an open ear for ideas. “I love talking to people that are not in retail or that are not in my business about things I’m going through, because they have a completely different perspective — that is not emotional, that is not brand-driven, that just comes from a different place,” he says.

Marquez wrapped up an MBA at Rice in May 2025, an experience he says allowed him to reflect and shape his leadership style and his definition of success. “It’s the people I work with — and how people feel at the end of the day and how I feel at the end of the day — that’s what matters,” says Marquez. He’s more patient these days, too. “I don’t react to things the way I used to,” he said. “I was more impulsive before. It was all about how fast I could get to an answer. And now it’s more about: Let’s think about it, see what our options are, and then make the best decision.”

But even with all that’s changed for him, the earliest lessons remain relevant. “Customer satisfaction is still paramount,” says Marquez. That 5-year-old kid at his grandfather’s store, eager to make a sale, is still alive and well. “If you come to the store and you stop me, and you tell me how much you love what we have, you make my day.”

Hear more from Marquez on the “Owl Have You Know” podcast:
 

On a pleasant April day in Houston’s Innovation District, Amelia Martin stands before a panel of hundreds of judges with a respirator dangling around her neck. In just 60 seconds, she lays out the danger of Styrofoam surfboards: In the workshop, the material sheds toxic dust and fumes; in the landfill, it lingers, leaching harm into the environment. From there she pivots, introducing her team’s solution: a nontoxic mushroom-based substitute to Styrofoam.

Pitching for a share of more than $1 million in prizes, Martin takes a steadying breath and lifts a surfboard prototype above her head. This moment is part of the “elevator pitch” at the Ion — stage one of the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), the world’s largest and richest intercollegiate graduate student startup competition, hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.

Martin’s pitch for her company, Mud Rat, is one of 42 presentations on the first day of the competition. Contestants range from chemical recycling for textiles to an automatic music transcription tool, an AI-powered sports watch, and firefighter gear made without carcinogenic PFAS (i.e., “forever chemicals”). There are many innovative ideas in this room, but only a few will make it through to the final rounds. Tonight is just the beginning.

After the preliminary round of pitches comes to an end, attendees step out of the Ion into the Gulf air — a warm welcome to competitors who have come from as far away as Canada and Germany. Tomorrow, the audience will gather in McNair Hall to see which of the 42 teams will pitch their way into the next round.

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By the second day of the competition, student teams have been divided into “flights” by industry, depending on whether their product addresses a concern in consumer products, digital enterprise, energy/cleantech, hard tech or life sciences.

It’s 9:15 a.m. when New Jersey natives Harrison Nastasi and Justin Iannelli step up to the podium in the consumer products room as their team, representing Bobica Bars, passes around samples. The clock ticking, Nastasi dives into his journey as a young founder: Motivated by his mother’s lifelong battle with arthritis and his father’s diagnosis of celiac disease, Nastasi began a search for dietary alternatives to support those with health challenges. Combining the benefits of smoothie bowls with on-the-go convenience, Nastasi created and began selling Bobica Bars, high-antioxidant glazed granola bars, as a freshman in college. On stage, the team endures a series of hard-hitting questions from their judges — some about quality control and others about financial projections.

What the audience is watching today has evolved considerably since the contest debuted in 2001 as the Southwest Business Plan Competition, when it welcomed just nine competing teams and about 45 judges to campus. It was Dennis Murphree, a Rice Business lecturer of more than 25 years and a successful venture capital investor, who introduced the idea to leadership. The inaugural event succeeded through the efforts of business school student volunteers led by MBA student coordinator Tom Stein and the team at Rice Alliance under the direction of Brad Burke, who remains executive director of Rice Alliance to this day.

Much can happen in 25 years. This year’s competition attracted 550 applicants, the most competitive pool of applicants to date. Representing 34 universities and four countries, each of the 42 teams have spent months, and in some cases years, preparing to pitch their product, service or technology.

One floor below the Bobica Bars group, the Mud Rat team is passing around a block of what looks like hay and packing peanuts melted together. But when Martin (UConn) joins Patricio Acevedo Zarraga (Florida International University) to begin their 10-minute pitch, judges learn that the mysterious brick is actually dried mushroom mycelium — an environmentally safe and biodegradable alternative to Styrofoam intended for surfboard production.

Martin, who spent her childhood on the ocean and began making her own boards in high school, uses her expertise in plant sciences to field questions from the judges about the harvesting, longevity and biology of the source of their board. At the end of an otherwise captivating pitch, one judge asks a pertinent question: “Why are you limiting your product to just surfboards?”

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Downstairs, a group of students from the University of Houston huddles in deep conversation with investors, trading tips on the perfect pitch — and where they fell short. “You’re asking for money, so there has to be this confidence and trust that you could be a good steward of it,” says one adviser. “Investors are going to grill you on the figures. They’re going to grill you on the tech. They’re going to grill you on the business.”

Since its first year, the competition’s prize pool has grown from a modest $10,000 to $200,000 just five years later — crossing the million-dollar threshold in 2010. The money certainly helps teams get off the ground, but the sound advice and tough questions that come from judges and investors are equally helpful.

Though it was renamed from the Southwest Business Plan Competition early on, the RBPC has picked up many nicknames over the years — like “April Madness” (Fortune magazine) and the “World Series of biz school contests” (CNN Business, then CNNMoney).

With this claim to fame, the RBPC continues to draw judges from around the world. This year celebrates its largest ever crowd of judges, more than 350 actively participating judges in total, comprising dedicated annual participants and first-time investors alike. Some come from globally recognized corporations; others, from organizations dedicated to local impact in the Houston area.

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On the morning of day three, 15 semifinalists add new elements and finishing touches to their presentations based on the feedback they received in Round 1, while the remaining 27 teams make their way into the wild-card round and a shot at redemption.

In the semifinalist pitch room, Madeline Eiken, a bioengineering Ph.D. student from the University of Michigan, steps up. She shares how preclinical drug testing models are failing at the expense of patients around the country. Eiken, alongside Don Sobell, Charlie Childs and their team at Intero Biosystems, are at the brink of revolutionizing personalized medicine.

What began as Childs’ and Eiken’s Ph.D. research in Michigan’s Spence Lab led to the discovery of a functioning human intestine contained in a petri dish. Guided by Jason Spence, a professor who made the foundational discovery of an adult stem-cell-derived human intestinal organoid in 2011, the two Ph.D. students realized these miniature organs could function as preclinical tools to predict patient response while reducing costs and minimizing animal testing. Marketed as GastroScreen, the innovation out of Intero Biosystems allows for efficacy testing, disease modeling and a precise reflection of drug safety and toxicity.

Following the 10-minute pitch, applause gives way to a flurry of questions. Judges, impressed with their groundbreaking progress in the lab, ask about scientific limitations, financial restraints and exit strategies. Afterward, Eiken, Sobell and Childs collapse into chairs in the Anderson Family Commons and begin debriefing.

“It was a very reactive room of judges, and we got some amazing questions,” says Sobell, an MBA student at Michigan. “I was impressed by one of the judges who asked about how much we expected to raise before we could exit, which challenged us to think really far into the future.”

In the wild-card room, four students from Louisiana State University take the podium to share how FarmSmarter.ai, one of multiple AI teams at the competition, is on a mission to help farmers and agricultural consultants. With the help of a virtual assistant called FarmerAI, farmers can optimize their yield with access to agricultural and regulatory information, crop management strategies, geospatial data, weather impacts and all their field notes with ease. Users can also identify plants, insects, fungi and diseases by simply uploading a photo to the app.

“I grew up farming,” says Cole Lacombe, an agricultural consultant and business developer at FarmSmarter.ai. “One wrong decision can be detrimental to your crops and livelihood. Our goal is to bring better insights and faster recommendations to farmers across the country.”

After all teams present, the crowd convenes in Shell Auditorium to hear which seven teams move forward in the last round. Intero Biosystems and FarmSmarter.ai are announced as finalists, along with re.Solution, MabLab, Mito Robotics, Xatoms and Rice University’s own team, Pattern Materials.

At awards night, the company showcase is abuzz with anticipation. Hundreds of judges mingle with the members of the 42 teams, congratulating them, sharing tips and encouraging next steps as attendees weave through the lobby to cast votes for their favorite startups.

After dinner, Rice Alliance executive director Brad Burke takes the stage alongside RBPC director Catherine Santamaria to announce winners of this year’s competition. Before the top teams are announced, an array of prizes is awarded — from industry-specific honors to those celebrating women and first-time entrepreneurs — ensuring all startups leave with recognition for their work.

One by one, final winners take the stage to accept their prizes, beginning with FarmSmarter.ai in seventh place. Six teams are called forward and then the room becomes quiet, just in time for the grand prize to be awarded to Intero Biosystems from the University of Michigan.

Founders Childs, Eiken and Sobell don’t just take first place at this year’s competition — they walk away with more than $900,000 in funding, the second-largest amount of prizes ever awarded to a single team in RBPC history.

“We’ve made so many wonderful connections at this year’s Rice Business Plan Competition. And it’s truly launching us into a whole new realm of support — from investors, connections and everything in between,” says Childs. “We’re so thankful.”

“Winning first place at the world’s largest graduate student pitch competition is a remarkable achievement. I’m excited to see how Intero Biosystems and their people-focused mission continues to grow and make an impact in medicine,” says Peter Rodriguez, dean of Rice Business.

“It’s been an honor to see the passion and innovation each team has brought to this year’s Rice Business Plan Competition, and we’re tremendously proud to support them in their journey.”

2025 RBPC Finalists

1. Intero Biosystems, University of Michigan
2. MabLab, Harvard University
3. Re.solution, RWTH Aachen University
4. Pattern Materials, Rice University
5. Xatoms, Western University and University of Toronto
6. Mito Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University
7. FarmSmarter.ai, Louisiana State University

Hear more from the 2025 RBPC winning team, Intero Biosystems, on the “Owl Have You Know” podcast below:  

Five Questions for Pattern Materials, The Rice University Team

Get to know Lucas Eddy and Alexander Lathem, Ph.D. students studying applied physics and two of the brilliant minds behind the Rice team. Their journey began in the James Tour Lab and has gained momentum through entrepreneurial support like the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), where Lathem is currently an Innovation Fellow.

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1. What does Pattern Materials do? We make graphene patterns using a laser scribing method, which can then be easily integrated into technologies like strain and pressure sensors, memory devices, and other advanced electronic devices.
2. What is one helpful critique you have received at RBPC? The most helpful feedback has been to better translate the tangible value added by our technology, which is very technical at first glance.
3. Where will your fourth-place prize money be going? Our prize money will allow us to purchase prototyping equipment and set up our workspace so we can focus on product development and customer acquisition.
4. What advice would you give someone entering RBPC next year? Run your pitch by people who are not interested in the scientific field that your idea comes from — and focus on the value you add to your chosen market.
5. If you had $1M to invest in one other team at this year’s RBPC, who would it go to? There were many great competitors at the 2025 RBPC, but it would probably be Motmot, which had a very neat robot designed to analyze water infrastructure without having to shut off service.

Learn More About the 2025 RBPC 

Based on research by Diana Jue-Rajasingh

Key findings:

• Markets may need to be built from the ground up in countries that lack the markets for distributing certain life-saving products.
• Building markets to distribute these products is likely a more scalable and sustainable approach to improving public welfare than dropping them into a community for free.
• Many scholars think of governments and multinational corporations as the main actors behind market-building. But they’re overlooking an important third actor behind this work: the “knowledge intermediary.”

More than two billion people — roughly one-third of the world’s population — cook with heat sources that pollute their households and cause respiratory illness. The World Health Organization estimates that three million people die every year from problems related to cooking on open fires or stoves using fuels like kerosene, wood, crop waste and coal.

The good news is many of these deaths are preventable. Since the 1950s, a product has existed that can cook without yielding as many harmful emissions. It’s called the clean cookstove.

Like many proven technologies that haven’t pervaded their intended markets, clean cookstoves raise some tough questions: How do we get these life-saving, culturally appropriate tools into wider use? And how can we do it in a way that is financially viable and self-sustaining — i.e., not entirely dependent on donations?

In theory, economic markets are meant to match supply with demand. But when it comes to delivering life-saving goods and services, that mechanism often falters. What happens if the demand for something like clean cookstoves exists in a particular region that has no market infrastructure for it? 

When Products Exist but Markets Don’t

Who creates such markets, and how? In a new paper published in Organization Science, Rice Business assistant professor of management Diana Jue-Rajasingh looks beyond the usual suspects — governments and multinational corporations — to study a critical market-building role: the underappreciated, multifaceted actor she calls the “knowledge intermediary.”

“There are critical players doing work in this space that are not companies or governments,” Jue-Rajasingh says. “This opens the door to a third sector.”

In the clean cookstoves space, for example, the main knowledge intermediary is the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA). (Coincidentally, the CEO of CCA is a Rice Business alum.) The CCA is housed within the United Nations but represents a broad coalition of public and private collaborators, including U.S. government agencies, nonprofits like the Shell Foundation and private companies.

Although building knowledge for a new market is costly and complex, Jue-Rajasingh’s findings show why investing in it is essential.

She contrasts the “knowledge-push” model of market-building with the more common “charity-push” approach, where products are simply given away in low-income communities. She argues that the knowledge-based strategy is more likely to produce scalable, sustainable results over the long term.

“The charity-push ignores what people actually want,” Jue-Rajasingh said. “It overlooks the need to build local capacity — whether through businesses, entrepreneurs or supportive policies and norms. You can hand out products, but if nothing is changing on the ground, the impact may be minimal.”

“If a country has only nonprofits and no companies, it won’t generate the full range of activity and momentum the industry needs — and the same is true in reverse.”

The Overlooked Role of Knowledge Intermediaries

Making a market, especially in poor and remote communities, is a complicated and expensive process with complementary components for both supply and demand. 

On the demand side, education is key: Potential customers need to know that an improved product exists and that it’s relevant to them. They also need to know how to correctly use and maintain it. Sometimes financing tools are also part of the equation, to ensure new products are affordable for their target audiences.

On the supply side, distribution networks need to operate dependably to get the products to people who need them. Often, building a new market also calls for government actors to step in, either by taxing certain products differently, helping to promote specific solutions or exempting key product parts from tariffs.

All of this collaborative, educational, market-making work falls under the purview of the knowledge intermediary.

Jue-Rajasingh explains that the effort unfolds in two stages. The first involves a first-order knowledge intermediary — in this case, the CCA — helping launch high-level industry development in a small group of countries (for the CCA, these include Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda). At this stage, the intermediary acts as a central hub: gathering and sharing information, brokering partnerships for pilot projects and learning opportunities, and providing resources such as technical assistance, business training, financing and more.

In the second stage, a different set of organizations move to the fore: those that have worked with the main knowledge intermediary in its countries of focus during stage one. Now, those many organizations become second-order knowledge intermediaries, bringing their new market-building knowledge further afield. These second-order knowledge intermediaries are typically existing companies and nonprofits. 

If a first-order knowledge intermediary like the Clean Cooking Alliance represents the hub of a wheel, second-order knowledge intermediaries are the spokes — transmitting knowledge and market capacity into new places.

Hubs and Spokes

To trace the ripple effects of the efforts made by first- and second-order knowledge intermediaries, Jue-Rajasingh conducted interviews and drew archival data from the various second-order organizations that were active in the CCA’s primary countries and beyond. She also leveraged a dataset derived from a CCA partner directory, which comprised 2,371 organizations operating across 113 countries between 2013 and 2019.

The data revealed that, indeed, second-order knowledge intermediaries that connected to the central hub of the CCA did appear to spur more entrepreneurial activity in the countries where they operated, outside of CCA’s geographical focus.

While she had suspected that second-order knowledge intermediary organizations were helping to spread market-building knowledge, she says she was struck by the level of activity she observed: “In the secondary countries, these organizations weren't just trying to sell products — they were working with other organizations to build a market infrastructure,” she says.

Of course, focusing only on market mechanisms to disseminate social solutions can be taken to an extreme, Jue-Rajasingh notes. The approach can overlook people who have very constrained financial resources, for example. Also: Countries with a healthy mix of companies and nonprofits were more likely to build strong markets for clean cookstoves.

“There were some kinds of knowledge and capabilities that companies could take up, and others that nonprofits could,” Jue-Rajasingh explains. “If a country has only nonprofits and no companies, it won’t generate the full range of activity and momentum the industry needs — and the same is true in reverse.”

Written by Katie Gilbert

Jue-Rajasingh, “Second-Order Knowledge Intermediaries and Multi-Country Entrepreneurial Entry into a Nascent Industry.” Organization Science (2025), forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15661 

When you’re narrowing down your dream business school, you may be pointed toward MBA rankings. There are many lists identifying the “best” programs, but it’s not always easy to understand what each of them truly measures.

Rankings can reveal a lot about what makes a top MBA program like Rice Business unique. Let’s dive into the methodologies behind major rankings, how to read these rankings effectively and what they can mean for you.

A Quick Guide to MBA Rankings

In your MBA search, you’ll find a number of sites and outlets reporting on a variety of elements from broad topics like overall program to specific lists, like which schools have the most female MBA students. Here’s a sample of what you might find on each website:

• U.S. News & World Report: Overall MBA programs; Best online MBA programs; Best MBA programs for specialties, like entrepreneurship, accounting, management, etc.
• Poets&Quants: Best MBA and undergraduate programs for entrepreneurship; Most influential business schools; Best international MBA programs
• Financial Times: Top 100 business schools in the world, with interactive columns evaluating salary, carbon footprint, diversity, faculty expertise and more
• Bloomberg Businessweek: B-school rankings by compensation, learning, networking, entrepreneurship and diversity; MBA schools ranked by region
• Fortune: Annual MBA program ranking that includes components like acceptance rate, median base salary of new grads, median GMAT and tuition
• Princeton Review: Best Business Schools based on alumni and student surveys; Top graduate entrepreneurship programs (No. 1 spot held by Rice Business for six years)

How Are MBA Programs Ranked?

At first glance, rankings might seem straightforward: the higher the rank, the better the school, right? The truth is that each ranking system uses its own formula, weighing certain factors more heavily than others. 

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For example, rankings from the U.S. News & World Report emphasize school reputation and career outcomes. To do this, they measure peer and recruiter evaluations in a quality assessment (25%), starting salary (20%), salary by profession (10%), employment rates at graduation (7%) and at three months (13%), and evaluation of student selectivity (25%), which includes student GMAT/GRE scores, undergraduate GPA and acceptance rates.

By contrast, The Financial Times takes a more international approach, evaluating components like career progression (i.e. salary increases), professional growth, faculty research and education, international mobility, alumni workforce and various diversity metrics.

And business school aficionado Poets&Quants combines multiple rankings like USNWR, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, LinkedIn and the Princeton Review, aiming to produce a composite view.

Reading Between the Rankings

Rankings can offer helpful benchmarks, but they might not capture the full value of a school’s MBA program. That’s why you should consider the factors that matter most to you and what your long-term goals are as you begin narrowing down your options.

When evaluating rankings alongside your personal goals, be sure to keep in mind that:

• Methodology matters. Each ranking system emphasizes various metrics and focuses on specific priorities, like career progression or diversity.
• Metrics can be narrow. Most lists measure specific quantifiable metrics, which can discount intangible (but critical) factors like campus culture, peer relationships and networking strength.
• Lists change annually. Rankings fluctuate, sometimes due to minor statistical shifts and other economic and geopolitical factors. A slight change in rank may not necessarily reflect a real difference in program quality.

Rankings can offer a ton of insights and key data, but it’s still worth looking past the numbers to understand what drives a school’s reputation and student success. At the end of the day, what matters most is your “fit” with a particular school.

Making the Rankings Work for You

At Rice Business our faculty expertise, career services and engaged alumni network have earned Rice Business consistent recognition across multiple ranking platforms. MBA rankings are valuable guides, but should be one of many tools you use in your decision-making process. 

The right MBA program should align with your personal ambitions, values and learning style, while equipping you with the network and skills to reach your goals. One of the best ways to find your community is by visiting a school. We encourage you to contact a Rice Business recruiter or attend an upcoming event to learn more about our MBA programs.

Explore the Rice MBA