When I was looking at MBA programs, I could see that Rice Business had the resources I needed and that they’d make them available to me. There are a huge variety of opportunities to learn here, and I’ve been able to get my hands on some real-world experiences starting in my first semester.

Zachary Green, FTMBA ’23

Becoming an orchestral musician wasn’t part of Zachary Green’s life plan. As an undergrad at Northwestern University, where he double majored in economics and double bass, the latter was essentially a side hustle. He didn’t think he had the chops to pursue it professionally. Practicing six hours a day, however, he kept getting better. “I guess I got a little bit carried away,” he says. At the end of college, he took a gamble. “I thought, ‘I’ll apply to the top conservatories and if I get in, I’ll go for it, and if not, it was fun while it lasted.’” He got into Juilliard. “I couldn’t turn down that opportunity,” he says.

After earning his master’s degree from the New York performing arts conservatory, he earned a coveted spot as a core member in Japan’s Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra. But after three years, he started thinking about what life as a performing musician would entail — and he began to reimagine his career path. That path led him back to his interest in financial planning and analysis, and ultimately to Rice Business. For Green, solving real-world problems in finance poses an intellectual challenge akin to mastering a musical instrument. “I want to work for a company where I can use finances to identify: where are things going wrong, where are we losing money, and how can we avoid that in the future,” he says. “Even though you can’t predict the future, you can account for it in different ways, and you have some idea what might go wrong.”

Most leaders are keen to improve creativity and innovation among their ranks, but few have the time to scour academic journals for fresh ideas. A new book co-edited by Jing Zhou, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology at Rice Business, aims to bridge the gap by gathering leading research on creativity and innovation in one place. Published in 2021, the “Handbook of Research on Creativity and Innovation” compiles some of the most groundbreaking recent findings on creativity for academics and managers alike. We spoke to her about how research on creativity has evolved and what readers will take away from the book.

Rice Business: This is actually the third handbook on creativity and innovation you have co-edited, after the “Handbook of Organizational Creativity” (2008) and “The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” (2015). What inspired you to undertake this series of projects?

Jing Zhou: Up until the beginning of the 1990s, most research on creativity and innovation in the workplace focused on R&D and patenting in the tech industry. As their collective knowledge of management and organizational behavior improved, researchers began to go beyond studying ‘Big C’ creativity, referring to radical breakthroughs in technology, to acknowledge the impact of ‘Small C,’ or everyday creativity. They began to consider the value of harvesting creative ideas — defined as ideas that are both new and useful — about products, processes and services from employees. That’s really how the study of workplace creativity burgeoned. By the mid-2000s, the co-editor of the first book, Chris Shalley, and I identified a need to take inventory of all the research that had come out and organize it into something digestible.

How does this third handbook differ from the previous two?

Our 2008 book was the first attempt at summarizing research findings on how to promote employee creativity. The chapters in the book highlighted key things managers could do to increase the creativity of their employees, from giving feedback and goal setting to creating a culture of creativity. The 2015 book, which I co-edited with Chris Shalley and Mike Hitt, was an attempt to connect the dots between research on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. A few years ago, my current co-editor, Bess Rouse, and I realized that the time had come to produce a book that accomplishes a few new goals: First, it takes a deeper dive into creativity research than ever before, going into topics that weren’t even on our radar while editing the first two books. Second, it is intended to stimulate new research by pointing out opportunities for growth. Finally, it provides useful insights for anyone looking to spark creativity and innovation in the workplace.  

What new research directions are you hoping to encourage with this handbook?

One of the things we highlighted was the need to combine quantitative with qualitative research to generate better insights. My co-editor, Bess, an associate professor of management and organization at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, is an expert on qualitative research methods, such as interviewing people in the workplace and observing how they interact while at work, while I focus primarily on quantitative research methods. To create knowledge, both quantitative and qualitative methods are essential. Researchers need to be able to capture phenomena in context, measure creativity and innovation properly, and draw inferences about causality. Our handbook summarizes useful, robust methods for quantitative and qualitative research with the hope that researchers will integrate these methods into their own work and generate more knowledge.

We are also hoping to inspire more research on the receiving side of creativity. After an employee has generated a creative idea, how will their supervisor react? How does that reaction contribute to or impede a culture of creativity and innovation? As a field, we have a lot of interesting questions to answer. And these are just a couple of examples. The book presents plenty of other new research directions as well.

Who are you hoping reads this book?

I hope that researchers, Ph.D. students and anyone interested in creativity and innovation in business will find this book thought-provoking. Ideally, it will serve as a platform for the cross-fertilization of ideas. Another audience I’m hoping to reach is managers. This work is intended, in large part, to encourage them to do more to cultivate both ‘Big C’ and ‘Small C’ creativity on their teams.  

What are some practical takeaways for managers looking to foster creativity and innovation on their teams?

Most managers talk about building a culture of innovation, but when you ask them how they go about boosting employee creativity or you try to dig deeper into what has and hasn’t worked, they can’t provide many specifics. Successful managers, in contrast, will take a systematic approach to enhancing creativity and innovation. Our book offers a number of practical suggestions for doing so.

We wanted to drive home the message that engaging in creativity and innovation should be an integral part of the job for every manager and every employee, whether or not they are listed in a formal job description.

We also encourage managers to view creativity as a social process. In one of our chapters, a top researcher in social networks lays out the process of building a social network that generates creative ideas. Essentially, you need to be purposeful in the way you connect with people and gather diverse perspectives. That’s how you get a broader pool of ideas to connect the dots and spark innovation.

Should we expect a fourth handbook in the future?

Given how quickly the field of creativity and innovation is progressing, I wouldn’t be surprised if we produced another handbook in a few years. And, for managers facing increasing competition in their industries, keeping their knowledge base upgraded and getting better tools to increase creativity and innovation on their teams is only going to become more important with time.   

Carol Shattuck ’82 has spent her career working with mission-driven organizations. So it seems only fitting that she was on a mission of her own when she came to Rice Business to pursue a Master of Business and Public Management degree.

A Houston native, Shattuck began volunteering at local community organizations while still in middle school, and after graduating from Duke University with a degree in psychology and public policy, she spent two years working for nonprofits in Washington, D.C. Her experience there taught her that while nonprofit administrators often earn their positions by virtue of their talent and their passion for the cause, they often lack the training to excel in the executive suite, a problem that Shattuck sums up as “good hearts, but not necessarily good management skills.”

Shattuck wanted to change that — first by acquiring those skills herself, and then by helping others to do the same.

The MBPM program, then in its infancy, helped her with the first step, providing her with a solid grounding in everything from economics to strategic planning — all of which she put to good use at her first job after graduation. As a staff consultant at the Support Center of Houston, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the effectiveness of other nonprofits, Shattuck worked with clients on management issues, organized training sessions for their staff, and otherwise helped them strengthen their institutions.

She did something similar as an assistant vice president at United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast (now the United Way of Greater Houston), where in addition to working on strategic planning and board development for the organization itself, she created the Management Assistance Program. Known today as Nonprofit Connection, the program has for more than 30 years helped the volunteers and professional staff of nonprofit agencies become more effective and efficient at delivering services with limited resources.

All that experience came in handy when Shattuck decided to launch her own consultancy in 1994. She made the move so she could spend more time with her family — she and her husband, David, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, had a son and daughter in middle school at the time — but she hardly slowed down. Among her various projects, Shattuck helped launch and run Communities Conquering Cancer, a collaborative venture led by St. Luke’s Health and the Kelsey-Seybold Clinic that provided free mammograms and arranged follow-up care for medically underserved women in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood.

Shattuck also worked with the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which hired her to consult on a couple of initiatives focused on early childhood education. That experience ultimately led her to become head of the Greater Houston Collaborative for Children, an alliance of foundations devoted to fostering healthy child and family development, in 1998.

Six years later, Shattuck would lead the organization through a merger, shortening its name to Collaborative for Children and broadening its mission to include serving families with young children, improving the quality of early education, and strengthening the system of early childcare. By the time she stepped down as president and CEO in 2018, the organization had become one of the leading nonprofits in the greater Houston area focused on improving the lives of children under 5, with more than 85 personnel and an annual budget in excess of $10 million.

Shattuck’s tenure at the Collaborative coincided with the dissemination of the first rigorous scientific studies to demonstrate the positive impact that early childhood education has over the course of an individual’s life, and she was quick to act on the data. In addition to establishing information and referral services (first a telephone hotline, later an online database) for parents seeking quality childcare in their neighborhoods, Shattuck strengthened the training that the organization offered to parents of young children and worked with state agencies such as the Texas Workforce Commission to close the gap between what the state required of childcare centers and what research indicated was necessary for high-quality childcare.

She also spearheaded an intensive effort to improve access to good early childhood education in underserved neighborhoods. In 2008, for example, Shattuck launched a program called College Bound from Birth in Sunnyside, an historically Black and economically disadvantaged neighborhood south of downtown. The program, which has since expanded to several other neighborhoods, provides everything from professional development for teachers to mentoring services, curriculum development and classroom materials to childcare centers in areas where quality childcare has traditionally been hard to find.

“It was a real joy to be a part of that process,” says Shattuck, who describes the “night and day difference” she and her colleagues saw from year to year in the centers they supported.

Shattuck is heartened by some of the broader societal changes she witnessed during and after her time at the Collaborative, such as growing public awareness of the importance of early childhood education and the prospect of increased federal funding for childcare.

Yet now that she is back running her own consultancy, Shattuck Consulting LLC, for the second time in her career, Shattuck has returned to her roots: She’s focusing on areas that, in her experience, have the greatest impact on a nonprofit’s success — scenario planning (for quick pivots in a fast-changing operating environment), strategic planning, and board of directors development and training. For example, she recently helped develop a strategic plan for the Houston Area Urban League, an organization that provides social services such as housing and workforce training in economically disadvantaged areas across greater Houston.

There are differences, to be sure, between the pre- and post-Collaborative iterations of Shattuck’s consultancy.

On the one hand, the confluence of challenges that mission-driven organizations currently face — an ongoing pandemic, continued economic uncertainty, a national reckoning on race relations — demands a whole new level of nimbleness and flexibility.

On the other, Shattuck now brings to the table 20 years of lessons learned as head of a major nonprofit — lessons she can draw on to help others navigate these troubled times.

Yet some things have remained constant; namely, the rigorous approach to problem-solving that she acquired at Rice, and which helped her not only steer her own organization but also guide others as they have sought to make the world a better place.

“My training at Rice was critical,” she says. “It truly opened the door to the career that I had.”

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What is the ‘social cost of carbon’?

The social cost of carbon, a dollar figure per ton of carbon dioxide released, is factored into the costs and benefits of proposed regulations and purchasing decisions, such as whether the U.S. Postal Service should buy electric- or gasoline-powered trucks, or where to set emissions standards for coal-fired power plants. That extra social cost can tip the scales for whether a regulation’s costs appear to outweigh its benefits.

Feb. 16, 2022 | Jim Krane and Mark Finley

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Academic research award: smart ideas with real-world impact

[Shrihari Sridhar at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University, Rice Business Professor Vikas Mittal, and their fellow researchers] analyzed why screening rates for liver cancer were low for high-risk patients, deploying machine-learning techniques to understand the characteristics of those who responded best to different prompts to test, such as letters, emails or personalized telephone calls. That allowed them to recommend targeted approaches that would be more likely to succeed in place of the usual “one size fits all” outreach.

Jan. 18, 2022 | Andrew Jack

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Fake it 'til you make it: Early-stage investors fall for style over substance

Earlier research from New York University found that our judgments are shaped mainly by our prejudices, and our conclusions are often wrong.

In our personal lives, we miss out on getting to know interesting people. Recently, I wrote about managers overlooking quality job candidates. But investment teams can lose billions of dollars of clients’ money, Rice Business assistant professor Alessandro Piazza, doctoral candidate Brian Chung and Dortmund University’s Daniel Reese found.

Feb. 7, 2022 | Chris Tomlinson

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H-E-B dominates Austin-area grocery stores

Why do so many companies come up short in their strategy planning and implementation? Because their CEOs end up playing the role of firefighter, implementer or counselor. Four years of intensive data analysis conducted by the authors has shown the three roles repeatedly emerge, deflecting from strategy and keeping CEOs from elevating their companies.

Nov. 12, 2021 | Nicole Cobler and Asher Price

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Why hiring takes so long

“The more thoughtful the organization is in making decisions, the better the long-term outcome is going to be for both the applicant who gets hired and the organization,” says Brent Smith, associate professor of management and psychology at Rice Business.

Oct. 20, 2021 | Bryan Lufkin

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Supply chain crunch affecting local restaurants

David VanHorn, a supply chain expert and professor at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, said even if supply chains aren’t global that they are still complex.

“They're kind of like machines with a series of gears,” VanHorn said. “So if one of the interconnected gears breaks down for whatever reason, well, that means everything kind of stops. And yes, you can fix that gear but it still doesn't mean that the other gear, some other gear may not pop up and slow things down.”

Nov. 2, 2021 | Stefan Modrich

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The Bounce Back: This Trio Of MBA Jobs Reports Has A Common Thread

The business schools at three more U.S. universities — Rice, Georgia Tech, and Vanderbilt — have posted employment numbers for their MBA classes of 2021 showing salaries up, placement rates up, and other markers improving dramatically after the pandemic year.

At Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, the job offer rate three months post-graduation jumped by 7 percentage points over last year, and the acceptance rate by 3 percentage points; meanwhile Rice Business reported its highest recorded salary in school history.

Oct. 20, 2021 | Marc Ethier

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What happens if you pick the wrong date on your target-date fund?

You’re underestimating by 4.8 years how long you’ll be in the workforce and, as a result, you’re investing in the wrong target-date fund. And it’s costing you money, according to a new research report, “Missing the Target? Retirement Expectations and Target-Date Funds.”

How much is it costing you? On average it’s 4% or 0.2% a year, according to the authors of the paper, Byeong-Je An, an assistant professor of finance at the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University and Kunal Sachdeva, and an assistant professor of finance with the Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Jan. 26, 2022 | Robert Powell

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Rice MBA students win U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation competition

MBA students from Rice Business won the school’s second straight competition at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s MBA Case Competition. This year’s winners — Abhimanyu Bansal, Maya Stine and Nicholas Khater — won a total of $10,000 at the competition, beating 49 other schools from around the globe. This was the first year the competition was opened to international schools.

Dec. 14, 2021 | Ryan Nickerson

While Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor, was meeting with the school’s dean and two associate deans over Zoom early in the pandemic, her 8-year-old son snuck into her office and surreptitiously handed her a note. “He thinks he’s not being captured on video, but he is, so of course I have to read the note out loud,” she recalls.

The note read: “We’re out of fruits. Can I have a cookie?”

Neeley, the author of “Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere,” was somewhat embarrassed by the interruption, which came in the midst of a serious conversation with the school’s top leadership. But in fact it broke some of the tension. “It was a tender, funny moment that was really disarming,” she says. And her son got the cookie. “I later found out we did have fruit, but that’s another story.”

While remote work has kept many of us physically apart from our bosses and co-workers for the past two years, video conferencing has brought us inside their homes, giving us an uncannily intimate look at their lives. We’ve observed our co-workers in their natural habitats, with cameos from their roommates, partners, children and pets.

What we’ve seen on the screen hasn’t always been pretty. We’ve witnessed out-of-control pets, messy kitchens, overflowing laundry hampers — and worse. An attorney who once wholeheartedly trusted his boss’s judgment came to question it after glimpsing her home décor. A content creator said his editor’s lackadaisical approach to webcam placement revealed new sides of him — including directly up his nose, sometimes as he ate a sandwich.

If office life was a scripted series, working from home is a documentary, and the cameras are perpetually rolling. We’ve glimpsed outtakes we wish had been left on the cutting room floor. But in many cases, seeing our co-workers interact with their loved ones in genuine, if imperfect, ways can make them seem more approachable and more likable, especially when it comes to our managers, says Marlon Mooijman, an organizational behavior professor at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

“A core component of trust is showing vulnerability,” Mooijman says. “If you’re willing to admit that you make mistakes, or reveal something private about your personal life, that fosters trust, especially for people in senior-level positions.

“My research on vulnerability has found that, when it comes to seeing aspects of their life that aren’t perfect, the more power people have, the more authentic and endearing that seems. If your boss, who has a lot of power, shows vulnerability, that means they’re choosing to do so. But if you’re someone who lacks power, it doesn’t have the same effect. If your kids are running wild and your dog is barking, it might just seem like you’re unable to manage things.”

And sometimes a glimpse into a manager’s personal life can be more off-putting than endearing. A 26-year-old consultant whose boss regularly quarrels with her husband during Zoom calls says he feels like he’s watching a reality TV show that he can’t turn off.

“It’s not yelling; it’s kind of just snipping at each other,” he says. “It’s clearly derived from work-related stress. She’ll have been working for 10 hours and he’ll be like, ‘Are you going to have dinner?’ And she’s like, ‘Leave me alone, I’m busy.’ It’s very cringey. I want to say, ‘Do you need me to step away while you have this conversation?’”

For the consultant, the experience has been a teachable moment akin to a visit from the ghost of work-life future. “It’s stressful to see, but it’s an interesting case study in bad work-life balance,” he says. “Even though she’s someone I work for and look up to, I’ve realized that I don’t want to emulate her style of working.”

Our bosses aren’t thrilled with everything they’ve learned about us over the past two years, either. An August survey of U.S. executives found that nearly one in four had fired an employee over a Zoom misstep. Some of those missteps amounted to indecent exposure, like the episode that cost New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin his job. Less serious blunders have been excused, such as when a Canadian politician's camera turned on unexpectedly while he was changing after a jog.

And then there was Jennifer, who brought her laptop to the bathroom during a Zoom call, oblivious to the fact that her camera was still on. The video, apparently leaked by a co-worker, has been viewed more than 7 million times and spawned the Twitter hashtag #PoorJennifer. Nearly everyone who saw it commiserated with her plight. But seeing our colleagues with their pants down, accidentally or not, is something we can’t unsee.

“I don’t know how you recover easily from that,” says Neeley. “But I think people are forgiving if you ask them for forgiveness.”

More minor incidents — even those that feel mortifying to us in the moment — may come across as charming to our co-workers, Neeley says. “It humanizes us in ways that our impression-managed work personas won’t.”

That has been the silver lining of remote work, she says: it has made us reveal more authentic versions of ourselves, whether we wanted to or not. And that can bring us closer to our colleagues despite the distance. What we’re learning about them, after all, is that they are real people with flaws and foibles, like us.  

Spring has arrived in time for an in-person Rice Business Plan Competition and alumni reunion (April 29-30) after a two-year hiatus. There is so much to be excited about. I look forward to seeing your faces in McNair Hall and at events on campus and around the city.

It feels like a new beginning, and McNair Hall is experiencing a renaissance of sorts amid the activities.

When you’re next on campus, walk down the hall outside of the admissions office to see the mural by Kate Shepherd, “Tricycle Red, Pelican Gray etc., partial octagons,” which debuted in January. Then head up to the second floor, where you can get a close-up view of “Triple Virgo,” the hanging sculpture over the rotunda, and visit the renovated and reconfigured Business Information Center, the new Dean’s Suite and the Gibbs Gallery, McNair Hall’s new “family room.” It’s a place anyone is invited to relax, meet, mentor or just think quietly, and will also double as an event venue for smaller gatherings. Take a look at the updates here.

If you wonder why renovations to the building are important, the simple answer is that it makes the school a better place to study, teach and work. We have more students, undergrads and graduate-level, more professors and more staff than ever before. A refreshed McNair Hall keeps the technical infrastructure updated, attracts prospective students and high-level faculty and staff, and helps us stay competitive as a top 25 business school. Along the way, we improve how we function, too.

If I don’t see you at reunion, I look forward to seeing you soon.

— Peter

It’s early morning at the Ion, and founders, inventors and investors start to trickle in to the shiny new 266,000-square-foot innovation hub off Main Street in Midtown Houston.

Some grab a coffee and croissant from Common Bond on the ground floor before making their way to the nearby prototyping lab, where they can design products with a 3D printer and laser cutter. Others lug merchandise — whimsical wallpaper samples and cans of craft-quality cocktails, among others — upstairs to their co-working office space.

Later, a founder fires up the podcast room to record a segment with an investor, and when early evening rolls around, the ground floor buzzes as the seeds for investment are planted over dinner and drinks at the hub’s star-chef-run bars and restaurants.

That’s the vision for daily life at the Ion, the anchor of Houston’s budding 16-acre innovation district, which is planning its opening celebration in May. It’s the brainchild of Rice University leaders and city officials, who hope it will put Houston solidly on the startup map, rivaling Silicon Valley.

The Ion was envisioned as a base for startups in the accelerator or incubator phase, established innovative companies, venture capitalists and academics. “The space stimulates exciting conversations about what could be possible,” says Jan Odegard, the Ion’s executive director.

In the coming years, the Rice Management Company, which manages the Ion and oversaw its development, will spearhead the construction of several additional innovation district buildings, including more office space, retail and residential properties.

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A New Vision for Midtown

The idea for a Houston innovation hub gained momentum in 2018 when Amazon was searching for a site for its second headquarters. When the retailer bypassed Houston altogether, it was a wake-up call for the local business community.

Later that year, Rice President David Leebron and other leaders met with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to lay out a vision for the city’s future. The city had already been thinking about these issues; in late 2016, Mayor Turner had convened a taskforce to explore expanding Houston’s innovation economy. The taskforce had recommended that the city focus on finding a place where innovation activity could be centralized, similar to what had been done in cities such as Chicago and Cincinnati. Where to place the resulting innovation district, however, was a subject of debate.

During the meeting, Leebron mentioned the Sears building on Rice-owned land, built in 1939, and how it could be transformed into a vibrant mixed use space to support startups. The Rice Management Company (RMC), which oversees the university’s $6.2 billion endowment fund, had recently bought out the 28 years remaining on Sears’ lease. Rice currently owns 16 acres in the area, which connects downtown to the Medical Center and is less than a mile from Rice.

The mayoral taskforce visited a number of cities that had successfully undertaken such initiatives. Rice Business Professor Yael Hochberg, the head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative, was a member of that taskforce, and had been involved early on in the planning of 1871, Chicago’s technology hub and business incubator, housed in a historic market that city leaders reinvented to support early stage, growth stage and corporate innovators. “Putting everything together in one space — that is the secret sauce,” says Hochberg. “When you do that, you start to see the serendipitous interactions that really lead to new innovative activity. It helps entrepreneurs find other entrepreneurs, resources and investors.”

“The concentration of activity is what lights the rocket,” she adds. “We saw how this really helped entrepreneurial activity in Chicago take off, when we did this at 1871 and MATTER in the Chicago Merchandise Mart. We saw the potential for doing something similar in Houston, if the right location could be identified and secured.”

RMC representatives described how the old Sears department store could be transformed into a modern innovation hub that would benefit students. Brad Burke, the managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, an entrepreneurship initiative founded in 2000 to support startups at Rice and in the community, had seen the transformative impact 1871 had on Chicago’s entrepreneurial system and believed Rice could do even more.

“For two decades we have been building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Houston with thousands of startups, investors, mentors, corporations and service providers, but until the Ion, we didn’t have a central hub with the density and capacity to enable the interactions necessary to change the trajectory of startups in Houston,” Burke says.

At the time, Houston lacked a single location that connected entrepreneurs, corporations, the venture capital community, the government and civic community, and academia. Yet, “when all of those are working in concert together with each other, that really makes an innovation ecosystem cook,” says Kyle Judah, executive director of Rice’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), Rice’s center for entrepreneurship education and resources for students and faculty.

The RMC broke ground in the summer of 2019, and the Ion’s $132 million transformation was completed last summer. A hole cut a hole through the center of the previously dark Sears building allows light to spill in, and the 16-foot ceilings create an airy feel.

“The building is really unlike anything else in Houston,” says Ryan LeVasseur, managing director of direct real estate for the RMC. Historically, LeVasseur adds, Houston has relied on a few select industries for its economic development. Part of the thinking behind the Ion was to help the city further diversify.

Before and during construction, LeVasseur visited iconic innovation districts for inspiration, including the Cortex Innovation Community in Saint Louis, Missouri, the Kendall Square Initiative in Boston and Tech Square in midtown Atlanta. Odegard, who’s from Norway, toured the Oslo House of Innovation to source ideas, and both Odegard and LeVasseur helped secure the Ion’s membership in the Global Institute on Innovation Districts. 

Collaborations and Collisions

The Ion aims to be a place where innovators can collide and partnerships are born. In a sprawling city like Houston, a central, energizing location for innovators to meet is essential for creativity and growth.

“It’s really hard to feel energy and excitement about what’s happening in a city if the entrepreneurship and innovation community are so spread out,” says Judah.

The Ion secured Microsoft and Chevron Technology Ventures as founding partners and anchor tenants. Houston-based Baker Botts is a founding partner, too, and has an office in the building. Ion partner TXRX Labs, a Houston nonprofit, operates the expansive Ion Prototyping Lab on the center’s first floor. The 6,500 square foot lab is filled with cutting-edge equipment that startups can use to develop and refine their products, while TXRX staff provide hands-on training for entrepreneurs. Methodist Hospital used the space to design and 3-D print a prototype of a new cognitive function test for patients.

A massive soldering machine sits in the lab’s electronics workspace. Nearby are a series of circular lights designed by TXRX for installation along Houston’s bayou. Across the hall in the fabrication workspace, founders toil away on laser cutters and use lathes to shape and slice metal and wood. At the investor studio on the same floor, visiting investors can connect with founders. 

Members can also partake in the Ion’s programming, as can the general public. Recent programs have included “How to Start a Startup” and “Perfecting Your Pitch.” Baker Botts has also hosted free 30-minute consultations for founders.

On the Ion’s second floor is a bustling flexible workspace run in partnership with co-working space Common Desk. Startups and small businesses can choose from several workspace options, including shared and private offices or full suites with their own kitchenettes and conference rooms. Founders and owners collide and network at the workspace’s coffee bar, and there’s also a Wellness Room for nursing mothers.

Current tenants include All Hands Craft Cocktails, which makes “bar strength” cocktails in cans; the nonprofit BikeHouston; water testing company Water Lens; luxury designer wallpaper maker Olivia + Poppy; and Snapstream, a media workspace that helps companies tell their stories with videos, founded by Rice alum Rakesh Agrawal ’97, among others.

Members and the general public can also eat at the Ion’s multiple restaurants. The Lymbar, chef David Cordúa’s craft cocktail bar and restaurant, is scheduled to open early this summer. At Late August — a nod to the time of year when Sears’ iconic catalogue came out — chef Dawn Burrell and Chris Williams of Lucille’s will serve up Afro-Asian fusion. Second Draught, a 2,000-square-foot taproom run by Rice alum Adam Cryer ’01 and his wife Sarah Pope, will serve rotating beers on tap from some 70 Houston-based brewing companies.

Floors three through five are traditional office spaces that startups can move into as they grow, building out and renting space longer term. The Ion’s bottom floor is made up of an amphitheater and open meeting space with rolling white boards. Out front in the plaza, the community can gather at tables and chairs. A 10-story parking garage for around 1,600 cars is in the works.

Greentown Labs, North America’s largest climatetech incubator, is open down the street in a former Fiesta grocery store, and a dozen more mixed-use buildings will be built in the innovation district over the next decade.

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Room to Grow

For Rice Business students and alumni, the Ion provides opportunities for professional connections and networking, and a home base for budding businesses.

“We have an increasing number of MBA students who want to pursue entrepreneurial startups,” Hochberg says, “and the Ion can provide space for these fledging startups to launch.”

For the past three years, Rice Business has been ranked the top graduate entrepreneurship program in the country, due to the efforts of Lilie and Rice Alliance. “But while we’ve expanded and strengthened the innovation ecosystem on campus, the city itself hasn’t developed in lockstep,” says Hochberg. One of the Ion’s goals is for Rice graduates to no longer have to leave Houston to connect with investors and secure capital. After graduation, the Ion can be a landing spot for their ventures.

“It’s really a financial investment for future students,” LeVasseur says. “The Ion is attracting companies that think differently and providing opportunities for students at all of Houston’s universities to stay here for their careers.”

In 2020, the Ion received a $1.5 million grant from the Economic Development Administration to fund an accelerator hub, which will include the Ion Smart and Resilient Cities Accelerator, the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator, and DivInc Accelerator, a program for minority- and women-led startups. “The Ion’s Accelerator Hub is a unique collaboration that benefits all accelerators in Houston. As the most diverse city in the U.S., it is important that entrepreneurial resources are available to a diverse and an inclusive community, and the Hub will help ensure their success,” Burke says.

Last November, founders from Houston and beyond pitched their business concepts live in the Ion’s amphitheater during the Houston Startup Showcase, a year-long pitch competition. Cancer patient engagement platform Ankr was crowned the winner and received a $10,000 prize and $10,000 in legal support from Ion partner Baker Botts.

The annual Rice Business Plan Competition, in which some 42 startups from universities across the globe compete for more than $1.5 million dollars in prizes, will also benefit. The Rice Alliance hopes to host competition programming at the facility. Another idea is for finalists, in addition to prize money, to win working space at the Ion. “We’ve had several RBPC startups move their company to Texas as a result of meeting investors at the competition. The Ion will provide another incentive to attract those startups to build their companies in Houston,” Burke says. “We’re also looking at possibly hosting the Rice Alliance’s OwlSpark Accelerator at the Ion, which would provide a place for these Rice startups to reside at the end of the program.”

For Odegard, success also comes with connections — for example, if Microsoft or Chevron executives get drawn into a founder’s product demonstration or a captivating conversation. “That’s what we’re aiming for,” he says.

Organizers expect the innovation district, anchored by the Ion, to evolve into a true destination, a walkable, bikeable, livable district, a so-called “15-minute city” where everything community members need to live and work is just 15 minutes away by foot or bike.

“The Ion is just the tip of the iceberg,” Hochberg says. “The innovation ecosystem that we are building has the potential to be a game-changer for Houston and its startups. The platform and potential is there for Houston to build an ecosystem that truly expands its economic base, and that takes advantage of all the diversity that Houston has to offer.”

Before the pandemic, Scott Gale ’19 dressed in a suit and spent up to seven hours a week commuting to and from his global strategy job at Halliburton headquarters north of Houston. Every quarter, he jetted off to far-flung destinations like Argentina, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.

His hectic schedule left little time for self-care or for quality time with his wife, Nicole, and their four kids. “I had a bad joke that I never saw my house in the light of day,” Gale says. “I was out before the sun came up and back after it went down. It was a grind.”

Then, in early 2020, at 36, Gale was diagnosed with colon cancer. He started chemotherapy as the world went on lockdown and transitioned to remote work. Not long afterward, he took on a new role creating an energy accelerator for Halliburton, bringing together investors, startups, industry leaders and academics. It was a feat he says wouldn’t have been possible to complete so quickly without the ability to work from home.

“Remote work has been an absolute shelter through this storm,” Gale says. “This can’t be understated: It’s enabled me to bring my whole self to what I do.” Now, he can’t imagine returning to a traditional, in-office 9-to-5, even after the pandemic subsides.

The pandemic upended the work lives of countless executives like Gale, changing their perception of what work should be and how they want to do their jobs. Some shifted to work-from-home out of necessity during the height of COVID but found that they relish the benefits — from money saved without a commute to more time with family. According to the freelancing platform Upwork, employees who work remotely save an average of 51 minutes a day.

“The pandemic is a moment of reflection and consideration,” says Scott Sonenshein, the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management at Rice Business. “We’ve seen the empowerment of the worker and the recognition that the standard 9-to-5 schedule is passé.”

Now, more than 50% of employees say they want to work remotely at least three days a week, according to a recent PwC study, and 52% of men and 60% of women say they’ll quit a job if they can’t work remotely, according to FlexJobs. By 2025, the number of remote workers is expected to double from pre-pandemic levels, from 16.8 million Americans to 36.2 million.

Meanwhile, online searches for remote roles across industries jumped 360% from June 2019 to June 2021, according to the job search engine Glassdoor. This acceleration will add to what was already a growing trend: Over the last 12 years pre-COVID, remote work had seen 159% growth, according to McKinsey.

Working Smarter and Faster

For Gale, who’s now the executive director of engagement at Halliburton Labs, the transition to remote work was smooth. His first job out of college was as a work-from-home account representative for Dow Chemical, and the company put workers through remote work training.

“They taught us best practices, and I was able to dust those off the shelf,” Gale says.

When Halliburton’s CEO asked Gale if he would develop the energy accelerator, Gale jumped at the chance to build something exciting and new, a welcome distraction from his cancer treatment.

“If I’d been asked to do that job the year before, I would have been on a plane to San Francisco and Boston to understand the startup community and meet people,” Gale says. But during the pandemic, he met people over video instead, speeding up the process.

It took him a mere three months to make the connections he needed to build out the accelerator. He started the new job on June 1 and had an advisory board less than two months later.

“Work-from-home massively accelerated what we were trying to do,” Gale says. “Managing my own time and schedule made a huge difference.”

Now, the accelerator has seven employees. Nearly 40 companies have pitched projects across four events, and 12 were selected to participate in a 12-month “scalerator” experience.

At the same time, Gale gained valuable time with family. He started biking with his kids to school and often picks them up at the end of the day. He’s taught his now fifth-grade daughter how to play basketball, took his seventh grader to cross-country practice every week last fall, and spent time playing video games with his kindergartener son.

“I went from never seeing my home in the light of day to stepping out of my office and having lunch with the kids,” he says. “I termed it as reintroducing myself to my family.”

New Career Paths

The pandemic also changed the way Brian Jackson ’21 approached his work. 

When COVID first gained a foothold in the U.S., Jackson was working as a litigator at a small Texas oil and gas law firm, where he donned a sport coat and commuted daily to the office. He often spent long hours away from home — and his partner and their dog.

“I used to believe that being the first car parked in the lot at the office meant you were a good or even the best employee,” says Jackson, who now lives in Boston.

In the fall of 2020, the law firm let him go as clients scaled back projects, and he took a remote role working as a contract manager at renewable energy company Enel Green Power. No longer does he have to dress up or slog through a long commute. He’s enjoying his time at home working alongside his partner, who’s in hybrid dental school.

“My life shifted to being present with the people and dog I love,” Jackson says. “Now, I believe that having a workplace that cares about your individual need to balance career and home matters. Without the pandemic, I wouldn’t have shifted to a new career and would not have grown to know a culture that supports me.” 

According to a Pew Research study, Jackson isn’t alone. Nearly 40% of new remote workers say it’s now easier to balance work with family obligations.

In Seattle, Michael Scott ’05 also relishes the extra personal time remote work makes possible. Scott and his family of four moved from Austin to Seattle in the fall of 2018 after Expedia acquired the company he was working for, HomeAway.

At the time, Expedia was building a new headquarters on the Seattle waterfront. Scott moved to the new facility in November 2019, only to be sent home months later to work remotely because of COVID. At the same time, travel screeched to a halt. Scott’s team, which was responsible for managing cash and liquidity, worked day and night rebuilding forecasts and working through worst-case scenarios.

“It was incredibly stressful and burned out many people on the team,” he says.

At first Scott and his laptop bounced around the house, from the kitchen table to a card table in the bedroom. When it became clear that COVID wasn’t going away, he bought a desk and set up a work station in the basement. In March 2021, he joined Rice Business alum Jason Sanders ’15 at Fastly, taking a fully remote job as senior director of treasury.

Now, Scott is treasurer at Dropbox, a remote-first company. Among other perks of working from home: He walks his dog three times a day. “The dog is the biggest winner here,” he says. He also likes that his family could pick up and move again to a new city if they wanted to. “Remote work has really opened up options,” he says.

Yet at the same time, Scott misses being with colleagues in a shared workspace and the camaraderie and spontaneous, informal interactions that happen in offices, especially with projects that require back-and-forth or deep conversation. “There’s still not a good way to replicate that,” he says.

Keeping the Culture Alive

As CEO and president of the branding agency Savage Brands, Bethany Andell ’01 has worked throughout the pandemic to strike the right balance between safety and flexibility, culture and connection.

Pre-pandemic, her Houston employees were 9-to-5ers. “We were not used to a remote or hybrid workforce,” she says. She shut down the office in March, an easy transition since her employees work on laptops and already had video conferencing capabilities. Workers were able to take their computer monitor and desk chairs home with them.

“What was different, though, was that we didn’t necessarily understand how and when to connect with each other unless we were specifically working on a project,” says Andell.

She’s felt detached from what her teams were working on, despite weekly leadership Zoom meetings and all-staff Zooms. But she’s constantly trying new techniques. On a Zoom call after New Year’s Day, employees took turns setting a one-word intention for the year.

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For Martin Luther King Day, an all-staff Zoom featured a video of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. She also recently asked a new employee to give a 15-minute Zoom talk about himself, and on Fridays she hosts a Zoom coffee hour for anyone who wants to catch up.

Now Andell has cut her company’s office space in half and is moving to a hybrid “hoteling” model, where employees come in a few times a week to use an open desk. “I don’t care what time or how long they stay,” Andell says. “I just want to start encouraging people to meet in person,” especially for brainstorming or collaborations.

About a third of chief operating officers plan to reduce their companies’ office space, according to McKinsey. And while working remotely has benefits for workers, this could also benefit the planet. The average remote worker lowers their carbon footprint by around 1,800 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions by working from home, according to a report from Alliance Virtual Offices.

“We’ve become much more flexible in our thinking about talent and where people live,” Andell adds, noting that one employee moved to Washington State. For her own part, Andell enjoys working from home and finds she works harder without as many in-person interruptions. But there are drawbacks.

Sometimes she has trouble separating the work day from personal time. She’s lost her “liminal space,” she says, or the transition from work to home, which used to be her commute. “I’ve had to manufacture that transition,” she says. Some days, it’s a glass of wine that demarcates the workday from downtime at home.

Gale, too, has increasingly noticed the boundaries blurring between work and home, as have around a third of people working remotely, who say they’re working more hours now than they were before the pandemic, according to Pew.

Gale’s strategy has been to block off his calendar for key events like cancer treatment and family activities. He also uses the delay delivery feature in email, scheduling messages to go out in the morning rather than sending them at night. He doesn’t want employees to feel compelled to respond after hours because he’s emailing when his schedule permits.

In January, Halliburton began reopening its Houston campus, encouraging employees to come into the office several days each month. Gale appreciates the opportunities for colleagues to collide, which he agrees is hard to mimic virtually. But still, he prefers to maintain control over his schedule.

“It’s the flexibility that’s been fantastic,” he says. “It’s had a huge impact on our quality of life. It really has been a silver lining during the pandemic.”

Sonenshein acknowledges that, while some tasks are better done quietly at home, people are indeed longing for connection. “You do need that in-person interaction at least part of the time to build up camaraderie,” he says. “What we’re going to see is a blended approach. Hybrid work is here to stay for the foreseeable future.”