Public is invited to watch events online

In its 20^th year, the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) — the world’s largest and richest student startup competition — is going virtual. Register to watch at rbpc.rice.edu.

Forty-two startups from eight countries and 39 universities will compete for over $1 million in cash, investments and other prizes beginning June 17, with technological support for the online event provided by the Greater Houston Partnership.

The RBPC helps student entrepreneurs enhance their odds of success by providing mentoring, feedback on their pitches and startups, and connections to investors. Of this year’s entries, 45% are related to life sciences, 31% to energy, 12% digital% tech innovation, and 5% consumer applications.

The competition kicks off June 17 with the Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch competition, a fast-paced, 60-second glimpse of all 42 startups. Round 1, set for June 18, will feature 10-minute pitches from each startup followed by a Q&A session with expert judges, and seven winners will advance to the live finals June 19. Each finalist will have 10 minutes to sell itself, followed by a Q&A with judges. Scores will then be tallied and prizes announced.

“The RBPC creates an environment for competitors, judges, sponsors, volunteers and attendees to connect, learn from each other, pursue big ideas and make a powerful impact on people’s lives,” said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. “While we won’t be able to gather in person, and we’ll miss the energy of 500 people in the Jones Graduate School of Business, the virtual competition will still achieve its mission of providing connections and capital to promising graduate student-led startups. We believe this is essential for startups in this challenging economic environment.”

The RBPC, hosted by the Rice Alliance and Rice Business, has seen more than 235 startups go on to successfully launch their companies and raise more than $2.6 billion in funding.

This year’s prizes are expected to be similar to last year, including the $350,000 Investment Grand Prize from Goose Capital and the $100,000 second-place investment prize and $50,000 third-place investment prize from Jon Finger and Finger Interests, David Anderson and the Anderson Family Fund at the Greater Houston Community Foundation, Greg Novak and Tracy Druce. All finalists will receive prizes, with those placing fourth through seventh winning $5,000 each, sponsored by Norton Rose Fulbright, EY, Shell Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures, respectively.

Other notable prizes include the $100,000 Houston Angel Network Investment Prize, the $100,000 Artemis Fund Investment, the $100,000 TiE Houston Investment Prize and the $100,000 Texas Medical Center Innovation Healthcare Investment Prize. Additionally, the Owl Investors, who have invested over $3.5 million in RBPC startups since 2011, are participating again this year.

Additional cash and investment prizes sponsors include:

• $50,000 — Southwest National Pediatric Device Innovation Consortium
• $50,000 — NASA Johnson Space Center
• $25,000 — Texas Business Hall of Fame
• $25,000 — nCourage Women Entrepreneurs Investment Group
• $25,000 — Pearland Economic Development Corporation

By Mike Snyder

This article first appeared in the Houston Chronicle as Essay: Life in limbo — whether from sickness, job loss or quarantine — is a time for growth

In the wee hours of a winter morning in 1997, I lay on my living room sofa, not sleeping. I had moved from the bed I shared with my wife, imagining desperately that lying in a different spot might ease my restlessness. It didn’t work.

I was gripped by anxiety as I struggled with the symptoms of advanced liver disease, triggered years before by a virus I had picked up through a blood transfusion. The next year, I would undergo a life-renewing transplant. That night on the sofa, though, I had no way of knowing whether a donor would emerge in time.

I was in limbo.

Now, more than 20 years later, I’m facing something similar — but this time as part of a vast global experience, while the novel coronavirus halts the rhythms of daily life for much of the world’s population. This time, I’m trying to remind myself that, excruciating as they are, such “in-between” moments hold potential for growth, both personal and cultural.

Anthropologists use the word “liminal” to describe rites of passage, key moments of transformation in life. But the concept is useful in other realms as well. It’s no coincidence that the words “liminal” and “limbo” sound alike: Both derive from the Latin limina, or threshold.

A few years ago, former Rice Business professor Otilia Obodaru applied this idea to the contemporary workplace, where our career transitions now are far more abrupt and less predictable than they were in the past. Even before COVID-19, the narrative that held sway for much of the 20th century — a rung-by-rung climb from the mailroom to the executive suite, followed by a secure retirement — had given way to layoffs, instant obsolescence and vanishing pensions.

Obodaru argued that being in career limbo, while deeply unsettling, can be an opportunity for growth. The challenge, she wrote, is “tolerating painful discrepancies and allowing time for self-exploration and self-testing.”

Granted, that now might be a hard sell for millions of suddenly jobless Americans or their bankrupt former employers. Yet it seems to me that Obodaru’s insights are applicable to our global liminal moment in other ways. Growth opportunities can show up in areas of life other than work — as I discovered two decades ago in that terrifying, in-between twilight waiting for my transplant.

Even as businesses gradually reopen in some states, many workers are still liberated from fighting traffic on their daily commutes. (The only time I started my car last week was to keep the battery charged.) We’re walking and biking more. For me, all the additional physical movement comes from an uneasy mix of more leisure time and more anxiety. But there’s nothing ambiguous about the benefits of these new habits to us and to the planet. The carbon emissions that contribute to destructive climate change have dropped, and the skies over our cities are clearer.

Enforced social distancing is also leading us to embrace new ways of working, learning and finding entertainment, and some of these changes are likely to endure even when things go back to “normal,” whatever that might look like. Other changes might well be temporary: Our cities, for example, are quieter. And with cruise ships stuck in port, scientists are studying whether reduced noise on the oceans is benefiting the reproductive cycles of whales and other sea creatures.

Much has been made, too, of the creative opportunities carved out by this global moment: volunteers sewing face masks, scientists deploying all their skills to develop a vaccine, balcony concerts and at-home recreations of classic art. Even flower pressing is making a comeback.

Liminal moments, however painful, can also yield more intimate opportunities for growth: time for the faithful to pray and for the secular to meditate or reflect. Time for simply being.

This lifestyle, of course, wasn’t what I had in mind when I retired last fall after a long career as a newspaper reporter and editor. I was supposed to be in Spain or Latin America, striving for the fluency in Spanish that has eluded me for so long. Or, I was supposed to be at a literary conference in New York. Or, I was supposed to be hanging out in my neighborhood bar, talking about inconsequential matters with people I never saw anywhere else.

This time of quarantine also feels different from my previous liminal state, during the months I was waiting for a liver transplant. My plight then was individual, not shared with much of the rest of humanity. I was younger, in mid-career rather than retirement, with some years of child-rearing still to go. Even then, though, I was vaguely aware after emerging from surgery that I was open to changing my life.

I spent a few months at home recovering, and during that time I reflected on why I had chosen a career in journalism. (They pay you to write every day!) On my first day back at work, I went to lunch with my boss and told him I wanted to go back to reporting and writing after 11 years as an editor. This meant giving up my ambitions to advance to higher levels of management at the paper. It may have cost me some career earnings, but it felt right. And in the years that followed, I produced what I consider my most satisfying work as a journalist.

Today, home alone, I again feel the tug of potential transformation. I can’t say where my current liminal moment might lead, but I got a hint the other day when I was gazing out my living room windows. I realized that in the four years I had lived in my house, these windows had never been opened. The air conditioner or heater was always running, or I wasn’t home, or I just hadn’t thought about it. Strange.

I unlatched the windows, pushed them open and felt the spring breeze brushing my skin and the newly noisy birdsong filling my ears. I sat like that for a good half hour, just looking and listening. I felt no desire to pick up my phone, turn on the television or move to another part of the house. When my brother called and asked what I was doing, I answered, “Looking out the window.”

It seemed like a small miracle. I look forward to savoring more of them, even when the coronavirus is a distant memory.

Snyder is a former reporter, editor and columnist for the Houston Chronicle. He is now a freelance writer who contributes to Rice Business Wisdom.

Based on research by Vikas Mittal and Carly Frennea

• Customer satisfaction directly influences a company’s sales, margins and earnings.
• Smart companies correctly track and measure customer satisfaction by investing in the right statistical model.
• Leaders must gather and present customer satisfaction data to all employees in ways they can understand and use; employees need proper incentives to act.

Back when people flew nonchalantly for business, an unabashed fan of Great Reputation Airline took a flight where almost everything went wrong. First there was a weather delay. Then there was a mechanical issue. The crew was surly, the pretzels stale. Finally, after landing, when she made it to baggage claim, her suitcase was MIA.

But instead of complaining on social media, Great Reputation’s passenger wrote off the problems to a rare bad day for the airline – which showered her with drink coupons and later delivered her luggage to her hotel.

GRA’s response exemplifies customer satisfaction principles outlined in a paper by Rice Business professor Vikas Mittal and former Rice Business doctoral student Carly Frennea. Summarizing the major research about customer satisfaction, the coauthors codified their findings into a checklist for managers.

While most people understand the general concept of customer satisfaction, in business it’s a specific term summarizing a consumer’s post-use evaluation of the extent to which a product or service met their expectations. Satisfied customers are more likely to buy again, buy more, recommend a business to others and cost less to serve in the future. A satisfied customer doesn’t just cut customer-acquisition costs. She can also help a business attract the right customers through online recommendations.

But the most compelling reason to chase customer satisfaction, say Mittal and Frennea, comes from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, which tracks customer satisfaction ratings of public companies. Decades of studies based on this data show that customer satisfaction and financial performance go hand-in-hand. While the strength of this association can vary, the link is indisputable. “Nowhere else in marketing has the impact of a customer-based metric on a firm’s financial performance been so clearly and consistently established,” Mittal and Frennea write.

To help make that satisfaction/revenue link a felicitous one, the researchers recommend the five kinds of data managers should collect.

• Overall customer satisfaction: A summary evaluation of an overall experience.
• Behavioral intentions: “Loyalty metrics” that measure the likelihood of buying again, recommending to others and intent to complain.
• Attribute-level perceptions: Evaluating specific product or service features. For a doctor, this may include time spent waiting in the office, quality of care and explanation of diagnosis. For an oilfield services company, this may include product quality, safety, ongoing service and support, billing and pricing.  
• Contextual information: Comparisons to earlier experiences with a firm and against those with competitors.
• Customer background variables: Includes gender, age and use of competitors’ products and services.    

Once these data are collected, the researchers say, managers should use statistical analysis that includes all relevant variables (a method known as multiple regression). This allows companies to figure out which variables have the largest association with overall satisfaction, and which have none. For example, a multiple regression might show that the bad effect of dashing customer expectations is stronger than the good effect of exceeding those expectations. The analysis may also reveal that this effect is stronger for ongoing service and support, say, than for pricing and billing. Conclusion: The company should fix problems with ongoing service and support before tinkering with its pricing and billing strategy.

Companies should also share such customer satisfaction insights with employees and incentivize them to make customer satisfaction a top priority, the researchers write.  

To achieve this, executives need to see customer satisfaction as a strategic tool, not just a “good-to-have” afterthought. For this:

• Treat customer satisfaction as a strategic investment and integrate it into the strategic planning process.
• Don’t skimp on the science. Use the most advanced multiple regression models, and now machine-learning technologies, to distinguish the important from the unimportant, and prioritize the important.
• Using statistical science, link customer-loyalty patterns to actual behaviors such as repurchasing and repeat sales.
• Remember that your front-line employees are vital and motivate them by linking their performance to the right customer satisfaction metrics.
• Don’t just maximize customer satisfaction. Balance decreasing and increasing returns on satisfaction initiatives. For this, don’t rely on “voice-of-customer” based on casual interviews and discussions. Use rigorously designed customer studies that can be statistically linked to financial results.
• Share! Summarize satisfaction findings in understandable terms and train employees to act on them. Smart companies use this approach to derive their customer-value proposition and focus the company’s strategy.

The formula, after all, is a simple one. If customers are a primary source of your company’s cash flow, the first variable in your strategy needs to be making them happy.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Carly Frennea, now an executive at Nike, received her M.B.A. and Ph.D. at Jones Graduate School of Business.

To learn more, please see: Mittal, V. & Frennea, C. (2010). Customer satisfaction: A strategic review and guidelines for managers. MSI Fast Forward Series, Marketing Science Institute.