Owl Have You Know

Season 2, Episode 3

In this episode, Abbey Donnell ’17 joins host Christine Dobbyn to discuss how Rice Business empowered her to start her own company, the women entrepreneurship environment in Houston and how service providers can pivot through the pandemic.

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Updated from original post that was published on 11/30/2021.

It’s only natural you’d want to get to know your professors. What’s their classroom like? Are they researching something you can apply to your job or business idea? The decision about where to go to business school comes down to several factors. Who you’re learning from is key.

Our faculty, along with our students, staff and alumni, are the fabric of who we are. We’re intentional about who we recruit as faculty — both for research expertise and the unique insights they bring into the classroom. With an average class size of 40 and 211 faculty members — including more than 62 female faculty leading from the front of the classroom — you have the amazing opportunity to get to know your professors. Our 6:1 student-to-faculty ratio means impromptu conversations happen in the hallway after class when you have a question about a new concept. It means they follow up to see how that interview for your dream job went. It means they know your name and are invested in your success.

It also means that what they’re teaching in your course is infused with their latest and greatest research. From machine learning methods leading to understanding consumer and firm behavior better to designing and managing health care delivery systems, professors bring their findings into the classroom so you learn fresh ideas from the source.

You can read up on the professors who received this year’s Teaching Excellence Awards and learn about all our professor’s work on Rice Business Wisdom, the school’s online ideas magazine with tons of quick reads on the relevant, interesting, evidence-based research our faculty publish. This is a great way to get to know some of your professors before you start school.

Explore the Rice MBA

Rice Business is ranked the No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program in the United States for 2022 by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. This is Rice Business’ third No. 1 ranking in a row, its sixth year in the top three and the 13th year in which it has ranked in the top 10 on this prestigious list.

The Rice entrepreneurship ecosystem combines academic courses and co-curricular entrepreneurship programs led by the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) with community-focused efforts led by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.

“Our No. 1 ranking is a reflection of the work and effort of our entrepreneurship faculty and staff to continually expand our programs and impact on behalf of our student and faculty founders,” said Peter Rodriguez, dean of the Jones Graduate School of Business. “Our three-years-running spot at the top is a testament to the Rice faculty, the depth and breadth of resources that are available to entrepreneurs and innovators during their time at Rice and beyond, and the students who have capitalized on their time at Rice to learn and launch their ventures from campus to the community.”

The placement comes on the heels of other recent high international rankings for Rice’s entrepreneurship programs, including No. 3 from Poets and Quants and No. 5 from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

“When you combine the experienced entrepreneurs and investors who serve as our faculty and mentors, and the kind of problem-rich environments we can immerse our students in to discover and explore industries undergoing tremendous change, that’s a recipe for building a unique and special campus ecosystem,” said Yael Hochberg, head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative and Lilie and the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor of Entrepreneurship at Rice Business.

Rice student entrepreneurs develop their ventures through Lilie’s suite of experiential programs, leveraging resources such as the lab's state-of-the-art startup coworking space, equity-free funding and mentorship to accelerate their ventures, culminating with the Napier Rice Launch Challenge competition each spring.

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship offers one of the largest and richest business plan competitions in the world, the world-renowned Rice Business Plan Competition, as well as the Rice Venture Forums, which showcase startups to the community and corporate world. 

“Our students are able to launch promising business ideas and, with our connections, receive mentoring from members of the Houston entrepreneurial ecosystem and pitch to angel investors, venture capitalists and corporations,” said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance. “These opportunities are unique to Rice students and aren’t found on most campuses.”

The Princeton Review tallied its 2022 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.

For more information on Rice Entrepreneurship, visit entrepreneurship.rice.edu or email the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at lilie@rice.edu.

Across industries, conservatives are more satisfied than liberals with the products and services they consume, according to a study of more than 326,000 U.S. consumers by an international research team from Rice University, the Catholic University of Portugal, Boston College, the University of Texas at San Antonio and Korea University.

The researchers examined ratings from 326,532 customers in different industries --industrial goods, restaurants, educational videos and health insurance. “Consistently, results showed that conservatives are more satisfied than liberals with the products and services they purchased. This is profoundly important for companies and businesses whose goal is to provide customer value by satisfying their customers,” said study co-author Vikas Mittal, a professor of marketing at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business.

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Cultivating a base of satisfied customers is the holy grail for any successful business, the researchers said. A 2021 study by Mittal found that a 1-point increase on a 7-point scale measuring satisfaction resulted in 12% sales growth for firms. Satisfied customers help businesses grow sales through greater repeat purchases, increased positive word of mouth, more recommendations to friends and family and fewer complaints, Mittal said. When customers are more satisfied, they are also more likely to promote the company’s brand on social media, he said.

For every customer, the team measured political identity and customer satisfaction. They measured political identity in different ways: asking consumers to share the political party they supported, their past voting behavior, their self-ratings on the liberal-conservative spectrum and whether they watch CNN/MSNBC or Fox for news. Customers rated their satisfaction on a scale ranging from “completely dissatisfied” to “completely satisfied.” All studies showed that satisfaction ratings were higher among conservatives than liberals.

Why? “It is their higher belief in free will, or the extent to which they believe they have control of their actions,” Mittal said. “People with higher belief in free will see their life, destiny and outcomes as being under their own control rather than being predetermined. Due to higher free-will beliefs, conservatives are more trusting of their own purchase decisions and feel more satisfied with their purchases. Over time, customers feel good about themselves, thinking, ‘I chose a good product,’ and (feel) more satisfied with their choices.

“Some companies have embraced corporate political activism to satisfy their customers,” he said. “Such a strategy is almost sure to backfire because it forces companies to choose sides, whether liberal or conservative.

“Instead of choosing sides, companies should relentlessly focus on increasing customer satisfaction to drive sales,” Mittal said. “Doing so will be appreciated by their conservative customers more than their liberal customers, but both will be more loyal, engage in higher word of mouth and recommend the business more.”

The paper, “How Political Identity Shapes Customer Satisfaction,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, was co-authored by professors Daniel Fernandes of the Catholic University of Portugal, Nailya Ordabayeva of Boston College, Kyuhong Han of Korea University and Jihye Jung of UTSA. It can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211057508.