The winner of the 2019 Rice University Business Plan Competition (RBPC) will ring Nasdaq’s opening bell on the day before Independence Day.

Vita Inclinata Technologies from the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, will perform the ceremonial opening of the Nasdaq Stock Market trading day at 9:30 a.m. CDT on Wednesday, July 3.

Vita, based in Denver and Seattle, is pioneering new, innovative hardware solutions for daily safety challenges in aerospace, construction and other dangerous industries. Vita’s first product, the Load Stability System, was created to solve the deadly swinging of helicopter hoisting and sling-load systems.

Vita CEO Caleb Carr will be joined by Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which hosts the annual business plan competition, and Will Roper, the U.S. Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition.

A live webcast of the Nasdaq opening bell will be available at https://new.livestream.com/nasdaq/live. To receive a photo of the Vita team and Rice representatives at Nasdaq, email jfalk@rice.edu.

What: Ringing of Nasdaq opening bell.

When: Wednesday, July 3, 9:30 a.m. CDT. The ceremony begins at 9:25 a.m.

Where: Nasdaq MarketSite, 4 Times Square, 43rd and Broadway, Broadcast Studio, New York City.

Vita won nearly $700,000 of the record $2.9 million in cash and prizes awarded at the world’s richest and largest student startup competition April 4-6.

“We are honored to win the Rice Business Plan Competition,” Carr said. “It has opened doors to new resources and relationships that have accelerated our progress, and ringing the Nasdaq bell is an example of that. It is an extreme honor for me and my team and another opportunity that the Rice Business Plan Competition has provided us.”

Held at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business and described by Forbes magazine as “the Super Bowl and World Series of business plan competitions,” the 2019 RBPC brought 42 university teams from across the globe to pitch their new technology businesses to more than 300 venture capital and investor judges. Judges evaluated the businesses based on the investment potential.

More than 140 corporate and private sponsors support the business plan competition.

Since the RBPC’s inception in 2001, when nine teams competed for $10,000, more than 229 competitors have gone on to successfully launch their ventures and are still in business today or have sold. Past competitors have raised nearly $2.3 billion in funding and created more than 3,000 new jobs.

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

Follow the Rice Business Plan Competition via Twitter @RBPC.

Follow Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business via Twitter @Rice_Biz.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Webcast:

https://new.livestream.com/nasdaq/live

Feed information:
Fiber Line (Encompass Waterfront): 4463

Gal 3C/06C 95.05 degrees West

18 mhz Lower

DL 3811 Vertical

FEC 3/4

SR 13.235

DR 18.295411

MOD 4:2:0

DVBS QPSK

Social media:

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Photos:

To obtain a high-resolution photo of the market close, go to www.nasdaq.com/reference/marketsite_events.stm and click on the market close of your choice.

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship is Rice University’s nationally recognized initiative devoted to the support of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship education and the launch of technology companies. Since inception of the Rice Alliance, more than 2,300 early stage companies have participated at the 185 programs hosted by the alliance and raised nearly $7.2 billion in funding.

Based on research by Hajo Adam (former Rice Business professor) and Jeanne M. Brett

• Past research shows that getting visibly mad during negotiations brings concessions.
• But new research shows that the level of anger affects the negotiation’s end result. Some anger is better than none. Too much is a problem.
• Displays of anger can have side effects, harming long-term relationships.

The negotiations have dragged on for weeks, as you finalize the merger between your company and an industry powerhouse. The deal makes perfect sense, pushing both companies to grow in a way they couldn’t do individually.  

But whenever you think it’s finally time for a handshake, your counterpart backs off. The next talks are tomorrow and you’re seething. What to do? Keep an even keel and keep talking? Walk off? Or wig out? 
 
Former Rice Business professor Hajo Adam and Northwestern University professor Jeanne M. Brett looked closely at this type of negotiation, which, they point out, is not dissimilar from other types of negotiation, whether in the boardroom or at home. 

According to previous studies, expressing anger in a negotiation yields clear benefits. Now the researchers wanted to understand whether all displays of anger are equal.

It turns out, they’re not. Moderate-intensity anger made the negotiator look tough and spurred larger concessions than no anger. But high-intensity anger came off as inappropriate, and was less effective than a show of moderate-level anger.
 
The trick, in other words, is learning how to calibrate anger displays for the best outcome.

As anger intensity rose, Adam and Brett found, concessions rose, too. But at a certain point, as anger escalated, the concessions started to fade. Like a powerful medicine that also saps bone strength, powerful displays of ire during a negotiation had side effects, damaging long-term relationships. 

To track the effects of heated negotiations, the researchers tapped 226 undergraduate students from across the United States (88 men, 138 women, average age 21) to take part in face-to-face talks involving a student project. Then the researchers studied a second group with 170 participants (79 men, 90 women, one unspecified, average age 37) as they took part in a computer-mediated/online negotiation about mobile phone sales.

The professors used various methods to take the negotiators’ emotional temperature. In the first study the participants were paired off, with one student instructed to use anger as a negotiating tool. After the encounter, the other student rated his or her partner’s anger on a scale of 1 to 5.

In the second study, the professors manipulated statements including “This negotiation is starting to make me the slightest bit upset” and “This negotiation makes me TOTALLY UPSET!” In this instance, the participants expressed negative feelings about their counterparts even at low levels of anger, but the feelings got markedly worse at higher levels.  

These findings, the researchers note, signal a need for further understanding of the full range of emotions that can erupt during a deal making process. “It would be interesting,” they write, “to explore the influence of intensity with respect to emotions that are common in negotiations besides anger, such as happiness, disappointment or pride.”

Until then, Hajo and Brett advise, if you find yourself in talks and the person across the table is clearly playing games, go ahead and flash a bit of temper. Signal that you’re tough. But, the pair warns, it’s critical to use common sense. Go too far, get too rough, and you’ll not only fail to get the outcome you want, you may poison the relationship you need to do further business. Launching a merger, it turns out, can benefit from the same advice once given to young folks starting a marriage. There’s nothing wrong with showing some temper. But don’t go so far that your negotiating partner goes to sleep mad at you.

Hajo Adam was formerly an assistant professor of management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. He is now at University of Bath’s School of Management.

To learn more, please see: Adam, H. & Brett, J. M. (2018). Everything in moderation: The social effects of anger depend on its perceived intensity. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76, 12-18.

Based on research by Amit Pazgal and Yuanfang Lin

• Consumers need a range of information when they consider a product that’s just been introduced into the market.
• Timing plays a key role in determining the right kind of information firms should provide consumers.
• Marketers of a truly new product should tout its attributes and innovation. Marketers of similar products that come later should, if they’re high quality, educate consumers on what quality looks like ­— then let them decide which product is best. For marketers of late-appearing, lower quality products, honesty is the best policy.

From smart phones to video games to virtual reality toys, new products roll forward as relentlessly as the tides. So what, and how, should you tell consumers about your product to avoid being swept away in a sea of similar wares?

To answer this question, Rice Business professor Amit Pazgal and colleague Yuanfang Lin of Conestoga College dove into the particulars of how companies differentiate their products by informing consumers about a new product’s quality.

The rush of new products, they note, is particularly intense in technology, where innovations are constant — which means consumers constantly need information about them. Traditionally, tech companies make the case for their products using advertising, free sample, product trials and splashy product demonstrations. (See your local Apple Store).

But how does a consumer’s wish for information interact with their ultimate buying decision?

Timing, Pazgal and Lin found, plays a powerful role in the type of information that best influences consumers. Suppose, for example, Firm 1 offers a new product, say a smartphone with innovative features. This makes Firm 1 a pioneer. For a certain golden period, Firm 1 might hold a monopoly in the market, since there’s simply no other smartphone like theirs. This is the moment, the researchers say, to offer consumers information that reveals the product’s true quality and uniqueness. Because no similar product is out there, Firm 1 has the power to establish the parameters for judging its invention.  

Inevitably, of course, another company (call it Firm 2) will come up with something comparable. Thanks to the heavy lifting in innovation by Firm 1, Firm 2 has the luxury to create a phone of equal or greater quality. And this is when the tide starts to turn. One might assume Firm 2 would just inform consumers of the superior quality of its product. But, surprisingly, Pazgal and Lin found that in most cases Firm 2 will instead focus on educating consumers about their preference for quality — in effect, leaving it up to the buyer to decide which of the two phones they really wants.  

However, if another firm emerges with a similar product of lesser quality, its marketing will likely take yet another turn. Instead of trying to claim better quality, late entry companies offering an inferior product typically admit outright that their product isn’t as well made as other versions.

That’s because such firms calculate that if customers discover this themselves, they’ll react badly. By telling the truth and pricing appropriately, a firm can find a calm stretch of water elsewhere in the market, someplace where it’s not clashing directly with the earlier, higher quality products.

Whether it’s Alexa, a smart TV or a virtual reality game, Pazgal and Lin explain, when a product enters the market for the first time, consumers need to be shown how it works. When a second product in the same line is introduced by a different company, the marketing task changes: It’s now more important to show consumers how to identify a quality product, and then let them choose for themselves.

Any time a company launches a device or service into the world, in other words, it needs to trust consumers’ ability to learn — and not drown them with too much information. Informed what good quality looks like, Pazgal and Lin conclude, consumers will swim on their own to the item they truly want.

Amit Pazgal is Friedkin Chair in Management and Professor of Marketing and Operations Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Lin, Y. & Pazgal, A. (2016). Hide supremacy or admit inferiority ­– market entry strategies in response to consumer informational needs. Customer Needs and Solutions, 3(2), 94-103.