Photos: Houston innovation leaders weigh in on cybersecurity, tech, and more at inaugural event

total knock out

The Digital Fight Club made its Houston debut on November 20 at White Oak Music Hall. Emily Jaschke/InnovationMap

What do you get when you cross the information of an innovation panel with the ferocity of a boxing match? A verbal sprawling among innovation leaders that can only be known as the Digital Fight Club.

Houston's DFC came about with the help of Accenture, which had been a partner at the Dallas events, and InnovationMap, who teamed up as presenting sponsors for the event. DFC's founder, Michael Pratt, came up with the idea for Digital Fight Club as a way to liven up technology-focused events and networking opportunities.

The setup of the event is five fights, 10 fighters, and five judges. Each fighter has just a couple minutes to take their stand before the event moves on.

"This is Digital Fight Club," says Pratt, CEO of the company. "You get subject matter experts, and serious founders and CEOs on the stage and make them make their case. You learn something, it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot better than a panel."

The hour of fighting is coupled with a VIP event ahead of the showdown and an after party where further networking can continue on. At Houston's VIP event, InnovationMap got to check in with partners, fighters, and referees about how they thought the event was going to pan out. Check out the VIP event video here.

The panel of referees included GabriellaRowe, CEO of Station Houston; DeniseHamilton, CEO of Watch Her Work; TimKopra, partner at Blue Bear Capital; LanceBlack, Director at TMCx; and BarbaraBurger, president of Chevron Technology Ventures.

The refs asked two questions per fight, and were able to vote on the winners of each round — as was the audience through an interactive web-based application. The break down of the fights, topics, and winners are as follows:

Fight #1: Future Workforce of Robotics/AI. Matt Hager, CEO of Poetic Systems, vs Pablo Marin, senior AI Leader, Microsoft. Hager took the win with 77 percent of the vote.
Fight #2: Whose responsibility is cybersecurity. Ted Gutierrez, CEO of SecurityGate vs Tara Khanna, managing director and Security Lead at Accenture. Khanna won this round, snagging 66 percent of the votes.
Fight #3: Oil & Gas Industry and the Environment. Michael Szafron - commercial adviser for Cemvita Factory, vs Steven Taylor, co-founder of AR for Everyone. Szafron received 76 percent of the voites, securing the win.
Fight #4: Digital in our personal lives. Grace Rodriguez, CEO of ImpactHub, vs Javier Fadul, chief innovation officer at HTX Labs. Rodriguez won with the largest margin of the night — 85 percent.
Fight #5: Future of Primary Care Geetinder Goyal, CEO of First Primary Care, vs Nick Desai, chief medical information officer at Houston Methodist. Goyal received 72 percent of the votes to take home the win.

The fights were heated, and some of the fighters had knockout quotes, from Hager's "AI is mostly bullshit" to Khanna's "Compliance doesn't mean you're secure." For more of the knockout quotes, click here.

The fight is on

Emily Jaschke/InnovationMap

Mike Pratt, who hosted the event, founded the Digital Fight Club in 2016.

Ten Houston innovators took the stage for five fights on the role technology plays in the future of industry. Emily Jaschke/InnovationMap

Overheard: Local fighters land knockout statements at Houston's first Digital Fight Club

Eavesdropping in houston

On Wednesday, Houston's innovation ecosystem hosted the rowdiest crowd at a professional business event that the city has ever seen.

Digital Fight Club, a Dallas-based event company, had its first Houston event at White Oak Music Hall on November 20 thanks to presenting sponsors Accenture and InnovationMap. The event featured 10 fighters and five referees across five fights that discussed cybersecurity, the future of primary care, and more.

"This is Digital Fight Club," says Michael Pratt, CEO of the company. "You get subject matter experts, and serious founders and CEOs on the stage and make them make their case. You learn something, it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot better than a panel."

If you missed the showdown, here are some of the nights zingers made by the entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that were the fighters of the evening.

"I believe that computers can get a lot of information to create [something new]. That's my job, that's what I do, and I see it done."

— Pablo Marin, senior AI leader at Microsoft, during the fight on robotics and AI in the workforce. Marin's argument was that artificial intelligence and robotics can and will replace all repetitive jobs. However, he also believes that computers have the ability to create, as well, based on their ability to see the whole world and have access to all the world's information.

"AI is mostly bullshit."

— Matthew Hager, CEO of Poetic Systems. Hager, who won the first fight of the night, responded to Marin that, while businesses like to believe that AI is actually able to deliver results so that they can sell more, the technology hasn't actually arrived yet. Plus, Hager says AI will never be creative without the human element. "Creativity is about who created it. It's about the photographer, not the camera," he says.

"What if the seatbelt laws and the speed limits were defined by Dodge, Ford, or Chrysler?"

— Ted Gutierrez, CEO and co-founder of Security Gate, who argued for government to take the reigns of cybersecurity. He adds that companies are never going to be able to agree to one set of rules. "We gotta get one group to set the standard, and it's up to everyone else to refine that and innovate for it," he says.

"Compliance doesn't mean you're secure."

— Tara Khanna, managing director and security lead at Accenture, who won the fight on cybersecurity needing to be figured out by the business industry. She argues that the private sector wins the war on talent and recruiting, so it has the money and resources to dedicate to the issue in more ways than the government ever will.

"I was born, I'm going to die, and there is nothing like earth in the universe as we know it. It is worth preserving and protecting."

— Steven Taylor, co-founder of AR for Everyone, in the fight over the oil and gas industry's responsibility to the environment. He argued that it's going to be a mix of policy and corporate initiatives that changes the industry.

"I think the free market is going to get there if the consumer has the choice to pick what they want to do."

— Michael Szafron, commercial adviser for Cemvita Factory, who took home the win for the oil and gas and the environment fight. Szafron's argument was that corporations are going to do what their consumers want, so that's who would drive them to action. "Let's look at California —very regulated environmentalists, and a million of those people get moved to Texas," he says.

"Disconnecting our personal lives from technology would not only limit ourselves, but it would also limit our capacity to adopt those tools to the needs of our society." 

— Javier Fadul, chief innovation officer at HTX Labs, during the fight on digital in our personal lives. Fadul argues that not only does technology allow us to connect worldwide, but disconnecting would prevent that technology from developing further.

"I love tech, but now that it's on all the time everywhere, we need to make time to unplug."

— GraceRodriguez, CEO of Impact Hub Houston, who won the fight on personal technology. She says that yes, technology can help international connectivity, but it does more harm than good as people use personal tech as a default or distraction from humans right in front of them. "When your with people, be present," she says.

"Part of our innovation to redesign primary care is really to deploy technology out there to seamlessly provide care."

— Nick Desai, chief medical information officer at Houston Methodist, who argued that the future of primary care is new innovations within traditional medicine. He adds that virtual care, which is something Methodist is working on, can help improve accessibility.

"The future of primary care is here. It's called direct primary care." 

— Geetinder Goyal, CEO of First Primary Care, who won the fight on the future of primary care with his argument for a new, free market approach to medicine. Direct primary care opens up treatment and access to physicians with a monthly fee for patients to work outside of health care plans.

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Houston universities rack up rankings in reports on top schools for entrepreneurship

5 years running

Rice University and the University of Houston have once again scooped up accolades for their entrepreneurship programs.

For the fifth consecutive year, Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business has been ranked the No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program by The Princeton Review, a provider of education services, and Entrepreneur magazine.

“Our close ties to Houston as well as national startup ecosystems give our students unique opportunities to pitch to and connect with angel investors, venture capitalists and corporations,” Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance, says in a news release. “These connections allow for mentorship, as well as launch points for new ideas, not only for our students but also for the city and surrounding communities.”

The list identifies 50 undergraduate and 50 graduate programs that boast the best entrepreneurship offerings based on factors such as coursework, experiential learning opportunities, and career outcomes. The ranking measures more than 40 data points about the schools’ entrepreneurship programs, faculties, students, and alumni.

Also for the fifth consecutive year, the University of Houston’s Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship in the C.T. Bauer College of Business has been named the No. 1 undergraduate entrepreneurship program by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.

“We believe in entrepreneurship, we believe in free enterprise, and we’re in the number one city for entrepreneurship,” Dave Cook, executive director of the Wolff Center, says in a news release.

“When we put students into this entrepreneurial mix,” he adds, “and we introduce and reinforce free enterprise values, our intent is to change students’ lives and to create the next generation of business leaders with the highest integrity who are going to go out and create their own cultures, their own companies and their own futures.”

The University of Texas at Austin is the only other school in the state to make the top 10 of either the graduate ranking or undergraduate ranking. UT captures the No. 6 spot on the graduate list and No. 2 spot on the undergraduate list.

Aside from The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur honor, Rice climbed four spots in Poets&Quants’ annual ranking of the world’s best MBA programs for entrepreneurship.

Last year, Rice’s graduate school for business landed at No. 7 on the list. This year, it rose to No. 3, behind the first-ranked Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis and second-ranked ESTM Berlin.

This is the fifth annual ranking of MBA programs for entrepreneurship from Poets&Quants, a website that focuses on graduate-level business education.

“MBA programs are increasingly sought after in today’s environment, and our focus on entrepreneurship sets us apart,” Peter Rodriguez, business dean at Rice, says in a news release. “The entrepreneurship classes emphasize a combination of mindset and skill set and focus on multiple stages of the entrepreneurial process, preparing our students for any industry and climate.”

Poets&Quants relies on 16 data points collected through an annual survey to come up with its ranking. Among those data points are:

  • Average percentage of MBA students launching businesses during their program or within three months of graduation between 2018 and 2022.
  • Percentage of MBA elective courses with all of the curriculum focused on entrepreneurship or innovation during the 2022-23 academic year.
  • Percentage of MBA students active in the business school’s main student-run entrepreneurship club during the 2022-23 academic year.
  • Square footage of incubator or accelerator space available to MBA students during the 2022-23 academic year.

America's labor shortage crisis: Local Houston company’s solution for a thriving future

A Brighter Future

The labor shortage crisis gripping America is not isolated to a particular region; it's a challenge that reverberates from coast to coast.

CNN Business projects that this issue could cost the nation a staggering $1 trillion, while the Manufacturing Institute predicts that 2.1 million jobs will go unfilled. To address this pressing concern, a local Houston company called Innovapptive and its connected workforce platform stands as a beacon of hope to improve productivity and capacity, while also upskilling the digital native worker.

Innovapptive is a provider of a “mobile first '' AI-connected workforce SaaS solution to help companies manage labor shortage by empowering front-line workers with digital tools to boost productivity.

The platform’s integrated suite of apps for both the front-line workers and back-office staff closes the loop between people and assets to eliminate inefficiencies. By connecting the front-line workers and back-office with critical information in real time, and harnessing the potential of generative AI and cutting-edge AI/ML technology trends, Innovapptive is enhancing productivity and upskilling workers for some of the world’s largest brands.

Solving the labor shortage by focusing on productivity

The labor shortage crisis has left industries scrambling for solutions. Rather than simply trying to fill the void with more labor, the focus should be on optimizing the existing workforce.

By enhancing the productivity of front-line workers, companies can not only meet the demands of the market but also reduce the need for additional labor. A connected workforce platform can improve the productivity of the front-line workers by 10% to 20% to help companies do more with less.

Empowering front-line workers with real-time connectivity

Innovapptive's connected workforce platform brings front-line workers, back-office, and assets together by providing them with the right information at the right time.

Operators can simply execute their inspections, rounds, and raise issues. These issues automatically convert into an ERP notification and get pushed to a maintenance technician to close out the open compliance issue, while keeping the operator in the loop in real-time. At the same time, the warehouse is alerted in real-time on the work order priorities and criticality to ensure spare part kits are ready for the technician’s pick up.

This effective communication and collaboration between operators, maintenance, and warehouses is a game-changer for asset intensive companies nationwide. Workers can access essential data and insights instantly, leading to smarter decision-making, quicker problem-solving, and improved operational efficiency.

Recently, Sabert, a sustainable packaging company, launched Innovapptive’s solution and is seeing dramatic improvement in productivity. Click here to watch the video.

Harnessing generative AI and cutting-edge AI/ML technology trends to upskill workers

To achieve dramatic productivity improvements upwards of 20%, companies need to leverage the power of generative AI and AI/ML technology trends.

Innovapptive's platform has launched a beta version of its generative AI capabilities, automating the creation of paper-based inspections, SOPs, and work instructions. Furthermore, the company recently launched a computer vision-based AI/ML inspection solution in partnership with Deloitte.

The solution allows an operator or an inspector to simply take an inspection image and the image is instantly analyzed to predict the condition of the equipment, criticality, and use generative AI to describe the problem to their maintenance teams. By converging technology trends such as cloud, mobile, generative AI, and AI/ML, Innovapptive is streamlining processes and eliminating bottlenecks, resulting in substantial productivity gains.

Furthermore, Innovapptive is expected to launch a video AI/ML technology in FY-24 to rapidly upskill workers. This trend allows employees to access on-demand training materials and instructional videos, reducing the learning curve and increasing proficiency. By facilitating continuous learning and development, companies can adapt to changing demands more effectively.

A brighter future for asset-intensive industries

The labor shortage is a nationwide concern that requires a unified approach. Rather than relying solely on more labor, companies can take advantage of Innovapptive's connected workforce platform to empower front-line workers, connect them in real time, capture critical information efficiently, and harness the power of generative AI and cutting-edge AI/ML technology trends.

This holistic approach not only dramatically improves productivity by 10% to 20% but also reduces the need for additional labor. By embracing video AI/ML technology, businesses can rapidly upskill their workers, ensuring they remain agile and adaptable in the face of evolving challenges. Together, we can build a brighter future for American industries and address the labor shortage crisis more effectively.

Some of the world's largest brands rely on Innovapptive's technology, platforms and software, including:

  • Shell Oil
  • Hess
  • Chevron Phillips Chemical
  • Dominion Energy
  • Jemena
  • Loudoun Water
  • Newmont Mining
  • AkzoNobel
  • Pluspetrol
  • EDF Renewables
  • Sabert
  • LiftOne
  • Par Pacific

Innovapptive is headquartered in Houston with offices across the globe in India, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. To learn more and see what Innovapptive can do for your company, visit here.

Houston park opens new facility amid major transformation project

next step

The latest project from a Houston park that's got an ongoing transformation project underway has revealed its latest new feature.

Memorial Park, Houston’s most popular destination for runners and one of the best trails in Texas, has unveiled its new, state-of-art running complex on November 4. The new facility was first announced in 2019 as a part of the park's master plan redevelopment project, which includes the innovative Land Bridge that opened earlier this year.

Encompassing years in planning and constructing, this new complex features the 400-meter Roy H. Cullen Timing Track, a viewing decks, an event plaza, several gathering spaces, trails, and more. More than a simple running track, the complex is designed to be a central gathering spot for all Memorial Park visitors, notes Memorial Park Conservancy executive director Shellye Arnold. The complex will also serve as new gateway to the park’s Bayou Wilds trails.

This new complex is meant to bring more park visitors to multiple areas of the park, Arnold notes, as well as improve track conditions for the thousands who use it, including Houston Astros and Texans players and Olympians. (Olympic legend Carl Lewis is a frequent user.)

“The old timing track in the park is just worn down and not really that accurate, and it has strange turns and corners,” Arnold tells CultureMap. “The running complex is very fitting for the park and for Houston.”

Credit goes to the game-changing Ten-Year Plan, which turned the Memorial Park Master Plan marathon into a sprint with an accelerated set of projects via catalyst gift from the Kinder Foundation and various donors. Partners include the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, Uptown Development Authority, and Kinder Foundation, and the City of Houston Mayor’s Office.

That mean a new experience not just for runners, joggers, and walkers, but all visitors.

“It’s a microcosm of the park, a place where a lot of people go and train at four or five in the morning,” adds Arnold. “But it’s a gathering place in the woods. If you think about Memorial Park, part of the whole experience is being immersed in nature. And so this particular timing track is really much more nature immersive than the old timing track.”

Community access is also a priority, for adults and kids.

“There are a lot of schools in Houston that don’t have access to a high quality track — or a track at all,” Arnold says. “And so now, their runners can come out and use the track. It won’t be used for meets, because we won’t close it off to the public very often at all. But it’s all about accessibility. Any school in Houston that wants to use it will be able to bring their students out and enjoy it.”

So while running may be the draw, really, it’s the complex is yet another chance to enjoy Memorial Park’s 1,500 acres and 25 miles worth of trails.

“There are places to hang out,” says Arnold. “There will be a cafe that will open up nearby in the first half of 2024 and an event plaza that’s also opening that will be a place to gather or just hang out with a group. Those are some of the many of the reasons that we did this. All the things that we do is to build community and foster a sense of connectedness — and this track will do that.”

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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