Rice University, which has the No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program in the U.S., will now offer an undergraduate minor in entrepreneurship.

The program, administered by the university’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) and jointly offered through Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business and Brown School of Engineering, provides students with a pathway to pursue rigorous and interdisciplinary study in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. It enables students to understand the theory and frameworks behind different disciplinary aspects of entrepreneurship and how to apply these theories to develop and scale innovative solutions to societal problems.

“Entrepreneurship and the creation of new businesses and industries are critical to Houston and Texas’ future prosperity and quality of life,” said Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Finance at Rice Business, who leads Lilie. “Rice students continuously seek to lead change and build organizations that can have real impact on our world. In today’s new and uncertain world, the skills and frameworks taught in the new minor are particularly important.”

The minor’s curriculum helps students develop professional skills that are valuable beyond the confines of entrepreneurship, administrators said, such as the ability to identify critical problems or market opportunities and to develop validated solutions to meet these needs; design solutions that are sustainable, inclusive and equitable; embrace empathy to better understand customers, users, clients and team members; and excel in interdisciplinary teams and in communicating messaging across departments, organizations and industries.

Lilie, which was founded in 2015, is a cross-disciplinary initiative to provide students with skills and knowledge to succeed in a world where entrepreneurial capabilities are increasingly critical for meaningful and influential careers. Lilie’s inception expanded the entrepreneurial offerings at Rice Business, creating opportunities for both undergraduate and non-MBA graduate students. Lilie features a coworking space, graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship courses, and a variety of cocurricular activities and resources dedicated to supporting Rice students in entrepreneurial endeavors.

In recent years, Lilie has added a large variety of programs to the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Rice. For example, 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. In addition to the new minor, Lilie also oversees the Rice Business entrepreneurship concentration, which was founded in 1978 by the school’s nationally recognized faculty led by Al Napier and the late Edward Williams. Over the past decade, Rice alumni have created more than 535 businesses and raised more than $7.1 billion in funding, according to the school’s surveys. More than 80% of those companies are still operating.

Rice’s current offerings are universitywide and encompass renowned student- and community-facing efforts. The university is currently working with Houston’s city government 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. Rice is also developing the Midtown innovation district anchored by the Ion.

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 Instagram @LiuIdeaLab and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/liuidealab.

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

Related materials:

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

Based on research by Marlon Mooijman (Rice Business), Wilco W. van Dijk (Leiden), Naomi Ellemers (Utrecht), and Eric van Dijk (Leiden)

Key takeaways:

• Controlling critical resources gives power.
• As a person’s power grows, so does their distrust of others — and their use of punishment as a deterrence tool.
• The level of an individual’s power affects punishment decisions, which can then compromise managerial effectiveness.

Parents, bosses, managers: Most have done the same thing — punish someone who breaks the rules. And the person with power usually determines the proper punishment. Evidence also shows that the more powerful a leader grows (e.g., the head of a totalitarian government), the more partial they are to laws and rules.

This correlation between power and punishment led Rice Business professor Marlon Mooijman and colleagues Wilco W. van Dijk and Eric van Dijk of Leiden University and Naomi Ellemers of Utrecht University to wonder: What do leaders hope to achieve with their punishments? Specifically, the researchers wanted to know if an increase in individual power boosted the use of deterrence-style punishment. To find out, they created a model that was tested on nine types of power.

Power overall, the researchers note, is generated by control of critical resources. Usually, this control takes the form of monetary, physical or even social assets. Being in charge of these assets allows those with power (or resources) to impose punishment for infractions, anything from salary cuts to fines to prison sentences. The wielder of power may be a farmer with the right to shoot trespassers in his orchard, or a Saudi prince who can have a journalist murdered.

Like the nature of power itself, the punishments a person in power might brandish vary greatly. Even so, Mooijman and his colleagues write, a powerful person’s punishment strategy usually falls within one of two categories: deterrence or what they term “just-deserts.”

Deterrence punishments try to prevent potential rule breaking by making punishments public or mandatory. Examples include public announcement of mandatory minimum sentencing or a manager scolding an errant staffer in front of the whole office. Punishments can range from humiliation to tangible damages such as firing, community service or jail. Curiously, though, research on power and leadership shows that such common punitive steps aren’t always effective in preventing crime or transgression.

“Just-deserts” punishments take a different approach. This type of punishment simply responds to an offense once it’s committed. Just-deserts punishments don’t attempt to stop anyone else from committing the same offense; they simply castigate the offender for the broken rule. Research shows that most people prefer that offenders in their community receive this type of punishment.

To better understand the effects of the two types of punishment, Mooijman and his colleagues conducted nine experiments that drilled down on the connections between power, deterrence, punishment and distrust.  

First, using a power scale from previous studies that assesses people’s feelings of power in everyday life, they surveyed participants from the U.S., the Netherlands and Western Europe to determine who felt they had more power, and who felt they had less. In the subsequent studies, these participants were exposed to various facets of power such as “a general sense of power” or structural manipulations of power. Participants then were asked to consider a range of manipulated scenarios from tax fraud to academic plagiarism to social dilemmas.

The researchers analyzed the results to correlate power and distrust, distrust and deterrence and power and deterrence. In one study where subjects considered a tax fraud scenario, for example, it was found that participants who felt a stronger sense of power were less trusting of taxpayers than were participants who felt a weaker sense of power.

By combining and analyzing the results of each study, Mooijman and his associates discovered that as an individual’s power increases, that person’s trust in other people declines. This new distrust then propels them to impose public or mandatory punishments meant as deterrents. Overall, the researchers found, there is a clear connection between holding a position of power and supporting deterrence punishments — even though such punishments have been proven to be less effective.

The findings have practical implications for managers, policymakers and other leaders. The main takeaway? Don’t let your success as a manager blind you to effectively managing your subordinates.

As Mooijman and his colleagues’ research shows, with each new step upward in personal power, the likelihood of losing effectiveness grows more acute. And the more closely personal power becomes enmeshed with harsh deterrence efforts, the more likely we are to sabotage our own goals.

So you might want to think twice before calling that low performer on the carpet at the staff meeting — or, for that matter, spanking your children at home.

Mooijman, et al (2015). “Why Leaders Punish: A Power Perspective,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Based on research by Balaji Koka, Robert E. Hoskisson and Eni Gambeta

• According to new research, building strong bonds between a firm and its employees can be both helpful and harmful for business.
• When these bonds improve, in-house efforts at new solutions improve as well.
• But stronger firm-employee relationships can come at the expense of other types of innovation.

In the relations between a company and its workers, is there such a thing as too much love?

Sadly for those enamored by affection, according to professors Balaji R. Koka and Robert E. Hoskisson from Rice Business and professor Eni Gambeta of the University of Cincinnati, the answer is yes.

In a study of innovation efforts across 271 U.S. manufacturing firms, the researchers found that how strong or weak the relationship was between a firm and its employees had a direct impact on not just the amount of innovation, but also the type. When relations were strong, innovation did increase — but only as long as that innovation happened within the business with, say, line extensions. More radical changes, ones that might upend the company culture, were less likely.

The notion of innovation prospering alongside good bonds between a firm and its people seems, of course, to make perfect sense. Happy workers aren’t a bad thing. Past research shows that trust, workplace security and a system of rewards for imaginative solutions all affect in-house innovation the way food, vitamins and exercise function on human muscle. That is, they make it stronger.

But what about “distant search” innovation — ideas that aren’t created in-house, but brought in from outside?

Though local innovation thrives amid rich company-worker bonds, these same relationships might erode efforts at finding innovation from external sources, the researchers hypothesized. In a culture with low turnover, as is likely the case in a happy firm, a homogenous information pool and a partiality for institutional knowledge could lead to the quest for innovation turning too far inward.

Why does this matter? Well, as the history of business has shown, being too comfortable can be a signal of decline. Radical, culture-changing innovation may be disturbing, but it can also lead to greater strength in the long run.

In the 271 firms the researchers studied, they found that, as they expected, strong company-worker bonds correlated to less exploratory innovation. And as external searches for innovation dwindled, local innovation efforts grew. Simply put, in the happy firms innovation that was unfamiliar and disruptive was less likely. Meanwhile, the firms with the weakest company-worker bonds had four times as many instances of distant-search innovation as those with the strongest bonds.

So what do these findings mean for company leaders?

A supplemental analysis, the researchers write, showed that while stronger employee-company bonds enrich a firm’s overall productivity in innovation, they appear to harm a company’s long-term valuation. Meanwhile, stronger employee-company relationships have a spillover effect onto other stakeholders (such as stronger customer-firm relationships), which leads to an even stronger focus on local innovation and less emphasis on exploring more disruptive innovation elsewhere.

Valuable distant-search innovation, in other words, appears to be at risk when company culture is healthiest. So how should leaders respond?

Not by returning to feudal work practices, the researchers stress. Intentionally treating employees badly, they note, eventually poisons all avenues of innovation. Instead, thoughtful leaders should keep treating workers with decency, knowing that a healthy culture is the bedrock of a firm’s longevity.

But at the same time, the research suggests, managers of harmonious work cultures should anticipate soft spots in the search for outside ideas, and compensate for that. Being comfortable is good; being too comfortable is not. Being open to truly new ideas, even if disruptive, is worth encouraging.

It’s not unlike trying to keep up muscle tone after leaving grueling manual work for professional life. No one really wants to go back to breaking rocks or grubbing for tubers. Better to make up for any lost strength by adding something new, like yoga or tai chi, to train new muscles and sharpen concentration at the same time.

Balaji R. Koka is an associate professor of strategic management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University

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

To learn more, please see: Gambeta, E., Koka, B. R., & Hoskisson, R. E. (2019). Being too good for your own good: A stakeholder perspective on the differential effect of firm-employee relationships on innovation search. Strategic Management Journal, 40(1), 108–126.