Help your team grow with your needs. Courtesy photo

Finding quality IT staff while remaining on time and on budget has traditionally been a challenge for most mid-size companies, but the expansion of Kibernum to Texas is about to change that.

"Today, it is hard and expensive to find staff in the U.S., and even more so in Texas," says business development advisor Emilio Armstrong, of Armstrong Worldwide Group. "Since the market has a high demand on IT, software developers, and cybersecurity staff, nearshoring in the same time zone with the U.S. is the solution."

Kibernum has over 30 years of experience in information technology and is the largest staffing firm in Latin America. They have 1,600 active developers and support staff and 30 partners worldwide.

Among the many services provided by its professionals, who are passionate about innovation and technology, are software development, IT consulting, human resources for IT development, and IT Academy.

"At Kibernum, there is a need to install talent around the world and deliver technology solutions," says CEO Marcelo Solari. "Today, we are in a position of a global company and it makes us very proud. We are in a period of full expansion in the U.S., in one of the most important IT markets in the world, and particularly in Texas, one of the states with the greatest technological projection.

"We are confident that we will continue to be a true contribution to the IT market with the global talent that we offer, with flexible capabilities that we install in our clients, and insert ourselves into their ecosystem to support them in their digital evolution."

Why else should companies consider partnering with Kibernum? Here are five compelling reasons:

1. Qualified help only when you need it
The IT industry is red-hot, with employees constantly job-hopping to accept better offers. So why invest time and money hiring and training full-time staff when you're not sure how long they're actually going to stay?

The smarter choice is to work with a staffing solution like Kibernum, which provides workers who are already qualified and trained in the areas you need to fill. They can proudly boast only 3 percent staff rotation, compared to the industry staff rotation average of around 15 percent.

2. A more cost-effective rate
Nearshoring staff means you can pay an hourly rate that makes sense for your project, while the employee is dedicated to only working on the tasks you assign. No excess, no wasted time.

3. Grow with the demands
Whether you're pushing forward new projects or scaling back, Kibernum makes sure that the team size grows with you.

4. Working on U.S. time
Sometimes hiring outside help means contending with different global time zones, but all Kibernum staff operate within standard American business windows.

"All our services have a global seal," says Solari. "Remote work allows us to have talents that, regardless of their geographical location, prioritize the one that meets the profile that responds to the real need of the client to achieve their digital evolution. Once we find the candidates, we support them in the adaptation process, generating the necessary closeness in the midst of the remote culture that identifies us."

5. Low overhead
If the pandemic prompted smaller office spaces, don't worry: You do not have to accommodate Kibernum workers in-office.

"Your information technology team has a very important role to play in the success of your operation as a whole," says business communication adviser Carolina Selvidge, from Facehug. "It's not only about speed versus quality anymore — it's about agility and innovation. Any business that is going to survive the test of time requires a regular dose of experimentation. A cost-effective way of achieving that right now is Kibernum's safe nearshore opportunities."

Kibernum's current clients include Citibank, RSA, Walmart, DHL, Smart Start, Houston Food Bank, and Liberty Mutual.

Kibernum USA is an associate member at the Greater Houston Partnership, and Armstrong Worldwide Group is a member of the Energy 2.0 committee, which together creates a great partnership for local companies looking for support.

Read more here, then see how Kibernum might be the smart move for your company by contacting Emilio Armstrong at emilio@armstrongwwg.com.

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Houston researchers: Here's what it takes to spot a great new idea

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Having a “promotion focus” really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Key findings:

  • New ideas can be crucially important to businesses, driving innovation and preventing stagnation.
  • Recognizing those ideas, though, isn’t always easy.
  • Nurturing what is known as “promotion focus” can help managers spot fresh ideas.

Whenever the late surgeon Michael DeBakey opened a human chest, he drew on a lifetime of resources: the conviction that heart surgery could and should be vastly improved, the skill to venture beyond medicine’s known horizons and the vision to recognize new ideas in everyone around him, no matter how little formal training they had.

Appreciating new ideas is the heartbeat of business as well as medicine. But innovation is surprisingly hard to recognize. In a pioneering 2017 article, Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou and her colleagues published their findings on the first-ever study of the traits and environments that allow leaders to recognize new ideas.

Recent decades have produced a surge of research looking at how and when employees generate fresh ideas. But almost nothing has been written on another crucial part of workplace creativity: a leader’s ability to appreciate new thinking when she sees it.

Novelty, after all, is what drives company differentiation and competitiveness. Work that springs from new concepts sparks more investigation than work based on worn, already established thought. Companies invest millions to recruit and pay star creatives.

Yet not every leader can spot a fresh idea, and not every workplace brings out that kind of discernment. In four separate studies, Zhou and her coauthors examined exactly what it takes to see a glittering new idea wherever it appears. Their work sets the stage for an entirely new field of future research.

First, though, the team had to define their key terms. “Novelty recognition” is the ability to spot a new idea when someone else presents it. “Promotion focus,” previous research has shown, is a comfort level with new experiences that evokes feelings of adventure and excitement. “Prevention focus” is the opposite trait: the tendency to associate new ideas with danger, and respond to them with caution.

But does having “promotion focus” as opposed to “prevention focus” color the ability to see novelty? To find out, Zhou’s team came up with an ingenious test, artificially inducing these two perspectives through a series of exercises. First, they told 92 undergraduate participants that they would be asked to perform a set of unrelated tasks. Then the subjects guided a fictional mouse through two pencil and paper maze exercises.

While one exercise showed a piece of cheese awaiting the mouse at the end of the maze (the promise of a reward), the other maze depicted a menacing owl nearby (motivation to flee).

Once the participants had traced their way through the mazes with pencils, they were asked to rate the novelty of 33 pictures — nine drawings of space aliens and 24 unrelated images. The students who were prepped to feel an adventurous promotion focus by seeking a reward were much better at spotting the new or different details among these images than the students who’d been cued to have a prevention focus by fleeing a threat.

The conclusion: a promotion focus really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Zhou’s team followed this study with three additional studies, including one that surveyed 44 human resource managers from a variety of companies. For this study, independent coders rated the mission statements of each firm, assessing their cultures as “innovative” or “not innovative.” The HR managers then evaluated a set of written practices — three that had been in use for years, and three new ones that relied on recent technology. The managers from the innovative companies were much better at rating the new HR practices for novelty and creativity. To recognize novelty, in other words, both interior and external environments make a difference.

The implications of the research are groundbreaking. The first ever done on this subject, it opens up a completely new research field with profound questions. Can promotion focus be created? How much of this trait is genetic, and how much based on natural temperament, culture, environment and life experience? Should promotion focus be cultivated in education? If so, what would be the impact? After all, there are important uses for prevention focus, such as corporate security and compliance. Meanwhile, how can workplaces be organized to bring out the best in both kinds of focus?

Leaders eager to put Zhou’s findings to use right away, meanwhile, might look to the real-world model of Michael DeBakey. Practice viewing new ideas as adventures, seek workplaces that actively push innovation and, above all, cultivate the view that every coworker, high or low, is a potential source of glittering new ideas.

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom.

Jing Zhou is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology in Organizational Behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business of Rice University. Zhou, J., Wang, X., Song, J., & Wu, J. (2017). "Is it new? Personal and contextual influences on perceptions of novelty and creativity." Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(2): 180-202.

Axiom Space-tested cancer drug advances to clinical trials

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A cancer-fighting drug tested aboard several Axiom Space missions is moving forward to clinical trials.

Rebecsinib, which targets a cancer cloning and immune evasion gene, ADAR1, has received FDA approval to enter clinical trials under active Investigational New Drug (IND) status, according to a news release. The drug was tested aboard Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) and Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3). It was developed by Aspera Biomedicine, led by Dr. Catriona Jamieson, director of the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute (SSCI).

The San Diego-based Aspera team and Houston-based Axiom partnered to allow Rebecsinib to be tested in microgravity. Tumors have been shown to grow more rapidly in microgravity and even mimic how aggressive cancers can develop in patients.

“In terms of tumor growth, we see a doubling in growth of these little mini-tumors in just 10 days,” Jamieson explained in the release.

Rebecsinib took part in the patient-derived tumor organoid testing aboard the International Space Station. Similar testing is planned to continue on Axiom Station, the company's commercial space station that's currently under development.

Additionally, the drug will be tested aboard Ax-4 under its active IND status, which was targeted to launch June 25.

“We anticipate that this monumental mission will inform the expanded development of the first ADAR1 inhibitory cancer stem cell targeting drug for a broad array of cancers," Jamieson added.

According to Axiom, the milestone represents the potential for commercial space collaborations.

“We’re proud to work with Aspera Biomedicines and the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute, as together we have achieved a historic milestone, and we’re even more excited for what’s to come,” Tejpaul Bhatia, the new CEO of Axiom Space, said in the release. “This is how we crack the code of the space economy – uniting public and private partners to turn microgravity into a launchpad for breakthroughs.”