Rice University and its Jones Graduate School of Business have the No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program in the U.S., according to the 2020 rankings announced today by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. This marks the first time the Rice program has topped this category, its fourth time in a top 3 position nationally and the 11th year in a row the school has been ranked in the top 10.

The Princeton Review tallied its 2020 rankings based on a survey of leaders at more than 300 schools offering entrepreneurship studies. The 60-question survey covered the schools’ commitment to entrepreneurship studies inside and outside the classroom. Topics included the percentage of students taking entrepreneurship courses, the number and reach of mentorship programs, the number of startups founded by recent alumni and the cash prizes offered at school-sponsored business plan competitions. In all, more than 40 data points were analyzed to develop the rankings, which will be published in the December issue of Entrepreneur magazine.

“Entrepreneurship and the creation of new businesses and industries are critical to Houston and Texas’ future prosperity and quality of life,” said Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez. “Today’s ranking and our decades-long leadership in entrepreneurship education and outreach is a testament to our visionary and world-class faculty, the enormous success of the Rice Business Plan Competition and of our commitment to our students and the community we serve.”

The Rice entrepreneurship program was founded in 1978 by Rice Business’ nationally recognized faculty led by Al Napier and the late Edward Williams. Over the past decade alumni have created 535 businesses and raised $7.1 billion in funding, according to the school’s surveys. More than 80 percent of those companies are still operating.

Rice’s current offerings are university-wide and encompass renowned student- and community-facing efforts, from the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which launched in 2000, to the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), which launched in 2015.

Since its founding, the Rice Alliance’s activities have benefited more than 2,400 startups that have raised more than $8 billion in funding. Over 52,000 investors and corporate and industry leaders have participated in Rice Alliance in Technology Venture Forums in energy and clean tech, digital technology and life sciences, and other programs.

The Rice Alliance’s Rice Business Plan Competition is the world’s richest and largest student startup competition. Forty-two startups from across the globe compete in front of over 300 investor and industry judges. The competition awarded more than $2.9 million in prizes in 2019 and is supported by more than 140 corporate, government and investor sponsors. Over the life of the competition, participating teams have successfully launched 229 companies and raised more than $2.3 billion in funding.

Rice’s startup accelerator, OwlSpark, was founded in 2013 and offers an intensive summer experience that provides teams of students, faculty and recent alumni with the education, mentorship, space and networking opportunities required to launch their companies. OwlSpark is managed by the Rice Alliance’s Kerri Smith and Jessica Fleenor.

The Rice Alliance is led by Managing Director Brad Burke, who has served in that role since 2001 and is also executive director of the Rice-based Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, which represents 250 university entrepreneurship programs around the globe. “The No. 1 ranking represents the culmination of the efforts of a lot of people over the past 20 years, both inside Rice and across the Houston community,” Burke said. “We are pleased that the Princeton Review and Entrepreneurship magazine recognize that those efforts have successfully built the top entrepreneurship program in the country.”

Lilie is a cross-disciplinary initiative to provide students from across the university with skills and knowledge to succeed in a world where entrepreneurial capabilities are increasingly critical for meaningful and influential careers. Lilie features a coworking space for students, graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship courses and a variety of co-curricular activities and resources dedicated to supporting Rice students in entrepreneurial endeavors.

In recent years, Lilie has added a variety of classes to the repertoire available to graduate students. For example, in Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship, students work in interdisciplinary teams comprised of engineering, business and medical students to build medical device startups. In January 2019, students were offered the Student Venture Fund course, where they identified, screened and evaluated startups for investment by the Rice venture capital fund, which has $2 million under management. In addition, the annual H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge established in 2018 allows students to vie for over $65,000 in cash prizes through a series of workshops and three rounds of competition.

Lilie is led by Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Finance at Rice Business. Hochberg is among the leading experts on accelerator programs and entrepreneurial ecosystems and serves as managing director of the annual Seed Accelerator Rankings Project.

Rice Alumni | Entrepreneurs & Innovators, Rice’s alumni group for entrepreneurs, is an additional example of the full complement of innovative programs and opportunities graduate students have to translate ideas into action.

Rice is currently working with Houston and major corporations and organizations, such as the Texas Medical Center and NASA, to define and develop the future of technology and industry innovation in the city, and is developing the Midtown innovation district anchored by The Ion.

To view the complete rankings, visit https://www.princetonreview.com/business-school-rankings?rankings=top-25-entrepreneurship-grad.

For more information, contact Jeff Falk, director of national media relations at Rice, at 713-348-6775 or jfalk@rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Follow Rice Entrepreneurship and the Lilie program via Twitter @LilieLab and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/liuidealab.

Follow the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship via Twitter @RiceAlliance.

Follow the Jones Graduate School of Business via Twitter @Rice_Biz.

Related materials:

Rice Entrepreneurship: http://entrepreneurship.rice.edu.

Based on research by Robert E. Hoskisson (George R. Brown Emeritus Professor of Management), Jeffery Covin, Henk W. Volberda, Richard A. Johnson

• Certain cognitive factors differentiate people who start new ventures from their more staid counterparts.
• Still unclear is whether entrepreneurs think differently overall, possess qualities that lend themselves to entrepreneurship or become catalyzed by the entrepreneurial role itself.
• Not everyone can have an entrepreneur’s brain, but more research might reveal how you can walk the walk.

The entrepreneur strides into a room of potential backers. Swathed in understated grey, she walks with assurance and chats in the cool, easy-going cadences of the leaders she plans to woo. But will an approach like this really affect the fate of her startup? And if not, what will?

A literature review by Rice Business emeritus professor Robert E. Hoskisson and colleagues Jeffry Covin of Indiana University, Henk W. Volberda of Erasmus University and Richard A. Johnson of Arnold & Porter offers clues to a vast range of questions about the entrepreneurs’ trade. It also outlines where research still falls short. What, for example, most influences a startup founder’s success? Is entrepreneurial triumph driven by innate ability or acquired skill? What’s the role of factors such as regulatory structures or an entrepreneur’s own work environment?

Traditional research, Hoskisson and his associates note, makes it clear that certain cognitive factors really do differentiate people who start new ventures from their more staid counterparts. And recent scholarship has traced how individual entrepreneurs decide to launch their startups and how they spot entrepreneurial opportunities. Still unclear, though, is whether entrepreneurs think differently overall, possess innate qualities that lend themselves to entrepreneurship or somehow become catalyzed by the entrepreneurial role itself.

More research could help answer those questions. Research is also needed to pinpoint exactly how the best entrepreneurs express their plans in order to sound legitimate enough to earn funding and support, Hoskisson’s group says. What the scholarship does show is that that the grey-clad entrepreneur with the easygoing patter knows what she’s doing: symbolic language, gestures and visual symbols all help create professional identity, emphasize control and regulate the emotions of a viewer. Setting, props, style of dress and expressiveness all count, and the more experienced the entrepreneur the more props she uses.

At the same time, no unified model fully explains how successful entrepreneurs gain their funding. Models range from the hyper-rational analysis offered by game theory to a stimulus-response model in which people react as if they’re marionettes. Other mysteries include how the entrepreneurship impulse arises, how it shapes innovation and competitive advantage and how it is translated in individual actions and interactions. More research in these areas, says Hoskisson, would help not only entrepreneurs in the eternal quest for funding, but also the understanding of how to nurture human potential.

Examining institutional differences among countries and how that affects entrepreneurship is also ripe for study. So far, entrepreneurship research has focused on individual attributes. But there’s a need, Hoskisson and his colleagues say, for scholars to connect the dots between startup success and political environments, rule of law, regulation and entrepreneurship.

The same goes for work on diverse contexts in emerging economies. In transition economies, China being one example, networks create political and social capital that allows special access and legitimacy. On the other hand, in those same countries ponderous bureaucracies and basic resource limitations can hamper entrepreneurial projects. Detailed understanding of such cultures will only get more urgent as ventures in emerging economies increase and companies that are “born global” proliferate.

Also on the research to-do list about entrepreneurs: the chances of securing funding in given emerging economies and the power — or frailty — of their intellectual property laws. Regulation, especially, plays a pivotal role in these countries, Hoskisson writes. The lighter the regulation, the more entrepreneurship flourishes, according to one study of 54 countries. On the other hand, countries blessed with a strong rule of law offer entrepreneurs more opportunities for strategic entry.

Understanding the entrepreneurial mind, and its interaction with the material world, isn’t simple. Consider the late Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot’s plan to send gifts to all POWs in Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese government announced that a gift delivery was impossible while Americans were bombing the country. Undeterred, Perot offered to rebuild anything the Americans had bombed. Rebuffed again, Perot chartered a plane to Moscow, instructing aides to deposit the Christmas presents, one by one, at Moscow post offices, addressed to Hanoi.

Amusing as it can be to hear about such entrepreneurial gumption, it may be even more useful to study entrepreneurship systematically. Not everyone can have an entrepreneur’s brain, Hoskisson’s review of research suggests, but good scholarship might be able to teach people how to walk the walk.

Robert E. Hoskisson is the George R. Brown Emeritus Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Hoskisson, R. E., Covin, J., Volberda, H. W. & Johnson, R. A. (2011). Revitalizing entrepreneurship: The search for new research opportunities. Journal of Management Studies, 48(6), 1141-1168.

Updated from original post that was published on 11/01/2019.

Thinking about a career change or want to accelerate your current career? The Rice MBA and our Career Development Office (CDO) will give you momentum, with top-quality personal guidance and carefully developed contacts with key employers and alumni. 

Rice CDO offers students more time and more opportunities

Each full-time Rice Business student has the opportunity to meet with a career development team member and strategize options during five personalized advising appointments, compared with two appointments per student both at the University of Texas and at Wharton.

The outcomes speak for themselves. The ratio of companies-to-students that hire full-time Rice Business students is greater than at UT or Wharton. This is largely because the CDO staff is focused on rigorous service standards. For Rice MBA students, this focus on career development means there are more advisors per person, as well as frequent company visits to campus because companies actively target Rice for internships and full-time job recruiting, giving students a broad breadth of companies to consider. 

And the strategy clearly works. In the class of 2022, 68.5 percent of students accepted offers through school-facilitated activities. The vast majority of 2022 graduates - 94 percent - accepted job offers within three months of graduation, with an average competitive starting salary of $142,212. Rice Business students pay attention to this because they’re looking for compensation that is competitive with top business schools. Top Rice Business graduate employers include: Capital One, Dell, Deloitte Consulting, CenterPoint Energy, Chevron, ExxonMobil, EY, and KPMG.

Continuous contact with alumni builds a formidable network

To give a closer look at this high-energy career operation, we recently caught up with Phil Heavilin II, Executive Director of the Career Development Office. Heavilin had stopped in Washington, D.C. on the way home from the Week on Wall Street trek, a program in which Rice Business students meet alumni, recruiters and other business contacts at New York financial institutions. He was in Washington, D.C. to see alumni.

Year-round contact with alumni across the country, Heavilin says, is a key strategy in building the formidable professional network for Rice Business graduates. The D.C. alumni Heavilin was meeting work at Capital One, a financial services firm that had just finished a trial recruiting run with Rice Business. Heavilin wanted to get first-hand feedback on how the trial had gone. Recruiting was so successful, Capital One added Rice Business as a core campus recruiting school.

The recruiting opportunities at Rice are striking not only for their abundance, but also for their variety, says Heavilin. Though known best for its excellence in the energy industry, Rice Business also attracts employers in the fields of 
consulting, financial services and technology. Recruiters from healthcare, real estate and telecom companies also frequent campus to meet prospective hires. Regardless of whether the economy is bullish or bearish, Heavilin notes, Rice Business ensures its graduates will have a wealth of opportunities.

Companies know Rice Business graduates will strengthen their businesses

Companies, for their part, recruit from Rice because they know its graduates will strengthen their business. With average full-time student GMAT scores above 700, the intellectual firepower at Rice Business makes it a compelling brand for recruiters.

They know Rice graduates can move through quantitative and qualitative frameworks to analyze and advise on business decisions. They also know that Rice Business prioritizes communication skills. Training includes communication coaches who work with each student on a personalized basis. As a result, Rice Business graduates are exceptionally adept at communicating and negotiating.

This versatility is highly prized, Heavilin says. While recruiters want students who can wrangle complex data and analyze for key, actionable insights, they also need employees who can communicate across multiple levels within their organizations, as well as in diverse, global business environments.

To this point, Rice Business’ location – Houston– gives it an unparalleled advantage. Houston is both the most ethnically diverse city in the United States, and a thriving business center with Fortune 500 companies and a strong innovation ecosystem. Consequently, Rice Business students interact daily with people with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. This range of experience offers Rice Business graduates a professional edge.

Houston’s cultural breadth gives students a competitive edge

With this in mind, the CDO team closely watches for opportunities to expand the school’s cultural capital. Promoting women in business is one example. For 20 years, faculty and students have convened business leaders for the annual Women & Leadership Conference. To signal its support, the CDO is a sponsor. Heavilin and his team also work with employers to identify gender compensation discrepancies and educate them on ways to mitigate them.

Taken together, the career team’s relationships with employers, with alumni and with practitioners all combine to give the CDO outsized effectiveness. And all of these relationships, Heavilin adds, exist to serve Rice Business students. Give the CDO team a few weeks, says Heavilin, and they will know your name. Give yourself four or five advisory meetings with them, and you can look forward to building your own relationships in the context of new, challenging work.

The Rice MBA offers comprehensive support for career development and career change. 

Explore Our Rice MBA Programs

By Tracy L. Barnett

It’s been three-quarters of a century since Robert Wood Johnson, an early chairman of Johnson & Johnson, penned what would become the gold standard of corporate social responsibility: Put the well-being of customers first.

The credo was famously tested in 1982, when seven people in Chicago died from ingesting J&J Tylenol capsules tainted with cyanide. The firm’s swift decision to reverse the supply chain for the first time in history, launching a total product recall, cost millions in the short run. In the long run, the decision became a textbook example of best business practices.

Now, as J&J faces a welter of crises based on asbestos in their iconic baby powder and their role in the national opioid epidemic, that code is being tested anew. And once again, business leaders are watching closely. During institutional crises like this, experts say, pre-existing moral norms are key to surviving.

“Only if you are truly an ethical organization can you preserve that type of reputation with this multitude of stakeholders,” Rice Business professor Anastasiya Zavyalova said. “Prior reputation and bonds with stakeholders, strength of marketplace position, and leaders’ immediate response are other factors. But especially in this day and age, the more you try to hide who you are, the harder it will hit you.”

If allegations are true that the company hid damaging research, “that’s the kind of thing that’s unforgivable,” agreed loyalty expert Chris Malone, co-author of The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products and Companies. “What we’ve found in our research is that customers can be very forgiving in a lapse of competence or ability or technical skill. But when you have a lapse of trustworthiness – when you are intentionally doing something wrong or covering something up — that will damage trust permanently and is very, very difficult to recover from.”

In the 21^st century’s climate of diversification and decentralization, J&J’s credo may not have played as central a role throughout the company as it once did, Malone speculated. “There was a time, perhaps, looking in the rearview mirror, when that credo was more firmly and consistently practiced at J&J,” he said.  “I think that has become less and less the case as they increasingly became a pharma and medical device holding company… it seems they’ve taken on the habits and practices of those industries more broadly, and as a result it has watered down the application of that credo.”

Harvard Business School professor Stephen Greyser, whose case study of the Tylenol episode is a business school classic, noted that the firm’s current crises look very different from that in the past – and as such may prompt a different response. “When a number of people are dying very quickly, as was the case with the Tylenol,” Geyser said, “that’s very different from finding small amounts of asbestos in a product where it’s not clear what the consequences are.”

For any business facing serious allegations, all three researchers agreed that a strong ethical code, practiced daily, is a critical tool for weathering crisis.

Building a culture with such a code has to start with recruitment and continues through training, Zavyalova said. “Organizations that have a strong backbone of ethical culture are actually less likely to have a crisis event,” she said. “But even when they do, they have the reputational cushion and strong culture that allow them to claim with a straight face: ‘this is an anomaly in our organization.’”

Greyser concurred, adding that this seemingly self-evident truth continues to elude corporate leaders. Citing recent ethical failures at Volkswagen, Wells Fargo and FIFA, he said, “One wonders whether it’s either an inability to read or an inability to grasp [past] examples … that lead companies not only to behave unethically – that can happen – but to stonewall, to deny, and to stretch it out in such a way that they really are blaming the victim.”

These continuing blind spots stem from the fact that ethics are still rarely talked about in corporate settings, argues author Adele Cehrs, a former crisis-management adviser for clients including Lockheed Martin, Verizon – and, at an earlier date, Johnson & Johnson. But when a company has a strong ethical position that it’s long made it clear to customers and employees, she said, “you can recover faster from a disaster by saying, ‘We’ve always had this underlying value – this crisis is not aligned with it, and here’s how we’re going to bounce back.’”

Starbucks is one company that got it right, Malone said, after a store manager called the police on two young black men waiting for a colleague. “For one thing, they immediately took responsibility and apologized,” he said. “It would have been very easy to say, ‘That was a rogue manager who made a decision that isn’t supported by any of our training or management policies.’ But they said, ‘We take full responsibility for this as an organization; we failed to have enough training or enough policies to prevent this.’”

He also praised Starbucks’ next step: inviting experts as well as critics to help design a training program, closing all stores and losing an afternoon’s revenue to put every employee through the new training. In addition to signaling that the company takes fighting racism seriously, Malone said, “they sent a message to their employees that ‘We’re not going to throw you under the bus.’”

Integrity, in fact, needs to be considered at every stage of business, said Bruce Weinstein, a speaker and consultant who is author of “Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Untangling Your Toughest Problems at Work and Beyond.” When he is advising companies, Weinstein said, he checks to see if their job descriptions include words like “honesty” and “courage.” Performance evaluations, too, need to explicitly rate character as well as competence, he tells clients. “It doesn’t matter how competent someone is in sales, marketing, HR, or IT,” Weinstein said. “You don’t want a single dishonest person at any level of your organization.”

To Cehrs, there are important lessons to be learned from J&J’s ongoing crises. In both the talcum powder and opioid cases, data was available to point to possible problems, she noted. “If you’re inside the company and you have a lot of this data, are the signs pointing to a potential crisis?” she said. “It is the job of the communications, marketing and legal departments to break down the silos and say: ‘I see the smoke; this could be an issue.”

But only putting employees in situations that mirror real-life crises can show how they will respond. This notion — that values-based protocols must be in place long before trouble strikes — is already foundational in many high-risk fields. “We don't rise to the level of our expectations,” Navy SEALS like to say: “We fall to the level of our training.” Or, in the words of Omar Little, iconic “hood Robin Hood” in the series The Wire: “A man gotta have a code.”

Businesses need a similar foundation, Greyser argued. “How important is it to have such an ethical framework in place in advance?” he asked. “I would say: How important is it to have a culture where doing the right thing is normal?”

Tracy L. Barnett is an independent writer based in Guadalajara, Mexico. She is the founder of The Esperanza Project and the author of an upcoming book on environmental initiatives in Latin America.