The Rice Business Plan Competition, the largest such business plan competition in the world, will give out more money this year than last year.
In fact, “the more state officials that serve on the board, the worse the performance of the private equity investments made by the pension fund,” says Rauh. That disconcerting insight emerges from a paper recently published in the Journal of Finance by Rauh and colleagues Aleksandar Andonov of University of Amsterdam and Yael V. Hochberg of Rice University.
Barretto has experience as an educator shaping students in her role as a teacher in Preschool Programs for Children with Disabilities, Kindergarten, 1
The world’s richest and largest startup business competition is now open for applications from students around the globe. Graduate students with startup ventures are encouraged to apply for the 19th annual Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) April 4-6 at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Winners will be rewarded with prizes expected to exceed $1.5 million.
The world’s richest and largest startup business competition is now open for applications from students around the globe.
Graduate students with startup ventures are encouraged to apply for the 19th annual Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) April 4-6 at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Winners will be rewarded with prizes expected to exceed $1.5 million.
The deadline for applications is 5 p.m. CST Feb. 10. Students will need to answer a short questionnaire, submit an executive summary and an optional one-minute video pitch through the competition’s website, http://rbpc.rice.edu.
The annual competition, which attracts students from the world’s top universities, is expected to draw more than 500 teams in 2019. All applications will be reviewed by a committee comprising select members of the entrepreneurship and investment community. The field of finalists will be narrowed to 42 teams, and a cohort of 275 judges will decide which company represents the best investment opportunity.
New for this year: The RBPC has a custom-designed application, judging and scoring system. Developed and managed by Poetic, a Houston-based business technology solutions firm, the new platform will allow the RBPC to be more flexible and innovative than ever before.
The winner of the grand prize will ring the closing bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York.
More than 200 former competitors have successfully launched their ventures and are still in business today, including 25 startups that have been acquired. Past competitors have raised over $1.9 billion in capital and created more than 3,000 new jobs.
“The true measure of success for the Rice Business Plan Competition is the number of teams that launch, raise funding and go on to succeed in their business,” said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University, which hosts the event. “The competition has served as the launch pad for a great number of successful entrepreneurial ventures, and the success rate far exceeds the national average.”
The startup teams will compete in four categories: life sciences/medical devices/digital health; digital/information technology/mobile; energy/clean technology/sustainability; and other innovations. investment opportunity.
Top prizes in 2019 are expected to be similar to last year, including the $300,000 Investment Grand Prize from The GOOSE Society of Texas; the OWL Investment Prizes, which totaled $300,000 in 2018; the $125,000 Houston Angel Network (HAN) Investment Prize; and the $50,000 NASA Space Exploration Innovation Awards.
Cisco is again offering the largest cash prize at the competition. The $100,000 Cisco Global Problem Solver prize aims to recognize entrepreneurs who promote and accelerate the adoption of breakthrough technologies, products and services that capture the value of technological innovation to society. Special consideration will be given to businesses that also benefit the environment.
The second-place investment prize has increased to $125,000 in 2019. Finger Interests, Anderson Family Fund and Greg Novak of Novak Druce have contributed to the prize.
A new prize this year is the $50,000 Pediatric Device Prize. The RBPC is partnering with the Southwest National Pediatric Device Consortium at Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine to offer this award to support the advancement and commercialization of novel pediatric medical devices. Eligible devices must be FDA-regulated with a pediatric indication (0-21 years of age).
Station Houston offered a $50,000 investment prize and two Engine of Innovation prizes offering last year’s top winners an opportunity to join Station Houston.
A goal of the RBPC competition is to encourage more women to create venture-fundable, technology-based startups, and nCourage Entrepreneurs Investment Group, a group of successful women angel investors, will provide an investment prize to the top startup with female founders. Last year, the group offered two prizes that totaled $100,000.
Sandi Heysinger and Dick Williams have supported a Women’s Health and Wellness prize since 2015, and in 2018 they awarded $65,000 in prizes for a plan or plans that best further the cause of specialized diagnosis, treatments or other innovations that let women lead longer, healthier and more satisfying lives.
The Texas Medical Center Accelerator, TMCx, offered two investment prizes totaling $50,000, plus a guaranteed spot in their accelerator, while the Texas Business Hall of Fame provided a $25,000 cash prize to the top finishing team from Texas. Pearland Economic Development Corporation offered a $20,000 cash prize.
For more information on the 2019 Rice Business Plan Competition and application information, visit http://rbpc.rice.edu.
Rice University student-founded companies took home a total of $115,000 in equity-free funding at the annual Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge last week. 2025 Rice Innovation Fellow Alexandria Carter won the top prize and $50,000 for her startup Bionostic.
Alex Cantin is graduating this May with a degree in business management, including a minor in entrepreneurship, from the Virani Undergraduate School of Business at Rice and will join McKinsey as a consultant. Cantin said he chose Rice because of the faculty-student ratio and because he would be one of the early graduates of the new Virani School.
Rice Business professor Emily Prinsloo comments on dynamic pricing and its recent use.
Employees who feel sad are more likely to carefully analyze extreme, unethical behavior than those who feel happy or disgusted.
Based on research by Vikas Mittal, Karen Page Winterich (Penn State) and Andrea C. Morales (Arizona State)
Key findings:
Somebody left crumpled paper towels in the office restroom. A cat meme made you laugh out loud. Your coworker recently lost his elderly parent. Nearly every day of our working lives, we face situations that unleash a range of emotions.
Do these emotions affect our understanding of ethics? In a recent study, Rice Business professor Vikas Mittal joined Karen Page Winterich of Pennsylvania State University and Andrea C. Morales of Arizona State University to see if sadness, disgust or happiness impact the way we understand and react to ethics-based decisions.
The answer: yes, absolutely.
To parse how people respond to unethical behavior when they are sad, happy or disgusted, the researchers launched three separate studies involving more than 700 participants. They induced states of mind easily found in any workplace. Images of a dirty restroom triggered disgust; news of a positive work evaluation sparked joy.
When workers felt disgusted or happy, the researchers discovered, their brains engaged in heuristic processing – that is, using mental shortcuts to process information. When they felt sad, however, their minds churned in more complex ways: Their judgments about unethical behavior were slower and more deliberative than when they were either happy or disgusted. The processing was similarly slow when they were in a neutral state of mind.
Neither type of mental processing is inherently good or bad. But it does affect how workers see ethical decisions. Compared to those whose state of mind is sad or merely neutral, happy or disgusted people tend to see minor moral infractions as less important. Different emotional states, in other words, affect our judgment of an ethical infraction’s magnitude.
To draw causal conclusions about the magnitude of these judgments, the researchers induced sadness, disgust or happiness in participants by asking them to write an autobiographical passage recalling a time when they felt one of those emotions. This primed the subjects with that specific emotional state, after which the researchers presented them with a variety of different unethical behaviors.
Some of the hypothetical infractions were financial. In one experiment, for example, the subjects read scenarios describing behaviors such as tax fraud, insurance fraud and outright theft. And some of the scenarios were nonfinancial, but horrifying: For example, subjects were told to imagine situations involving cannibalism.
When a subject feels disgust, the researchers reasoned, it triggers a distancing reaction, leading her to withdraw both physically and psychologically. After all, people seem to naturally pull back from any disgusting situation. Because of this distancing effect, the subjects brains processed the unethical scenarios heuristically, using mental shortcuts.
Interestingly, subjects who felt cheerful showed a response similar to that of people who were repulsed. That’s because happy people rely more on mental shortcuts and don’t bother systematically processing their judgments. Just like disgusted people, they tend to heuristically process whatever tasks they engage in, Mittal and his colleagues write.
These shortcuts essentially meant that the subjects who felt disgust or happiness relied almost entirely on the gravity of an infraction itself to make moral judgments on unethical behaviors.
The workplace implications are significant. Employees or managers who feel sad, Mittal writes, are more likely to pull their weight and carefully analyze unethical behavior, however extreme or minor. Conversely, workers who are either disgusted or happy rely more on simply the magnitude of the ethical infraction when making judgments.
Most employees aren’t interested in embezzling a million dollars from the company coffers. But they might be tempted to fudge an expense report or pocket office supplies after hours.
So if a coworker seems fixated on the icky washroom floor, or has simply fallen deliriously in love, it may worth a gentle reminder that if they see something unethical happening, they should say something. Even if it requires a second look.
Winterich, K. P., Morales, A. C., & Mittal, V. (2015). Disgusted or happy, it is not so bad: Emotional mini-max in unethical judgments. Journal of Business Ethics, 130.2: 343-360. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2228-2.
The home purge TV show is now as rigorously structured as the hero's journey or a Petrarchan sonnet. In it we see the act of decluttering as a quest, and the tidied home as a proxy for our reborn selves. It's a form wonderfully suited to the animistic methods of Marie Kondo, the Japanese tidiying guru who taught the world to kiss its socks goodbye with a novel organising principle: if your belongings don't spark joy, thank them for their service and show them the door.
In 2005, a grand jury issued a report finding leaders concealed sexual abuse by priests there for four decades. Rice Business Professor, Anastasiya Zavayalova, has been examining how parishioners reacted to the archdiocese releasing names of the priests involved.
Where does it end? The problem with runaway inflation — exclamatory or otherwise — is that it doesn't, says James Weston, a finance professor at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business.
Clutter: why we have it, what it does to us and how to climb out from under its heavy burden.
Can a snapshot reveal your chances of a loan?
Illustrated by Nick Anderson. Based on research by Jefferson Duarte.
Can A Snapshot Reveal Your Chances Of A Loan?
To learn more, please see: Duarte, J., Siegel, S., & Young, L. (2012). Trust and credit: The role of appearance in peer-to-peer lending. Review of Financial Studies, 25, 2455-2484.
To learn more, please read: Trust Me On This
Jefferson Duarte is an associate professor of finance the Gerald D. Hines Professor of Real Estate Finance at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.
Nick Anderson is a Pultizer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
