An Auburn University startup, SwiftSku, was the RBPC’s grand prize winner this year. The brainchild of Auburn mechanical engineering students and childhood friends Mit Patel and Daniel Mazur, SwiftSku is a mobile application that lets convenience store owners remotely manage and monitor their businesses from their smartphones.

Rice Business moves up 12 spots to #3 this year for Best MBA Programs for Entrepreneurship by Poets & Quants: The Jones School itself is less than three decades old. But entrepreneurship was baked into its DNA from the get-go.

The Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University is ranked No. 3 in Poets & Quants’ World’s Best MBA Programs for Entrepreneurship rankings for 2022, up from No. 15 on the 2021 list. Poets & Quants created the annual rankings with Inc. Magazine to measure schools' performance in providing launching pads for entrepreneurial-minded MBA students. 

From oil and gas and space exploration to the largest medical center in the world, Houston has long been a capital for innovation. Mayor Sylvester Turner spoke at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business April 17 about his vision for the city as one of the leading centers of innovation and entrepreneurship, driving economic development and jobs over the next decade.

Ten companies were recognized as "most promising" at the 2019 Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship's Startup Roundup May 6 at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

Rice University’s OwlSpark and the University of Houston’s RED Labs will launch their annual joint startup accelerator program on May 16. The startups, whose offerings range from medical devices to consumer apps and enterprise software, will attend the 12-week program at Station Houston, an accelerator hub for startup technology companies, corporate innovation and entrepreneurship.

The winner of the 2019 Rice University Business Plan Competition 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.

After 12 weeks of refining their business models and building their companies as part of an annual startup accelerator program, teams from Rice’s OwlSpark and the University of Houston’s RED Labs pitched their innovations at the Bayou Startup Showcase held Aug. 1 at The Cannon and Bayou City Fellowship campus.