University of Houston: Tips for building an innovative team

houston voices

You've heard the adage that "teamwork makes the dream work," but how do you make that dream team a reality? Graphic by Miguel Tovar/University of Houston

"Teamwork makes the dreams work". The well-known phrase has been overused as a company motto. Yet, it remains true and always will.

Haven't heard it? Maybe you've heard, "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself," a quote by Henry Ford. Or maybe, "differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open," which was said by Albus Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" by J.K. Rowling.

Regardless of who said them, all these quotes emphasize the importance of teamwork and working towards a common goal. Several business owners in academia have also attested to this fact.

The co-founders of Advanced Codex Solutions offer some advice to help faculty entrepreneurs build an innovation team.

The key to success

Tarun Wadhawan, Ph.D., a University of Houston alum, team lead at Schlumberger and co-founder of Advance Codex Solutions, said that the key to success is to build the right "tribe" around you. He mentioned that, in prior business endeavors, he failed to make a team that could see his vision, which made that vision hard to accomplish.

"My last company included a couple of extremely talented students who were able to develop business plans and win national competitions. However, the company failed because other members had different aspirations and priorities," said George Zouridakis, Ph.D., the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Technology at UH and co-founder of Advanced Codex Solutions.

Even if a majority of the team is talented and dedicated to the vision, the company only succeeds if the entire innovation team is on the same page.

A strong innovation team is the first step to a startup's success. In his "9 Traits The Most Successful Innovation Teams Have In Common" blog, JC Grubbs, founder of Tandem, said, "an innovation team's primary objective is to pioneer something new at a company—a product, a process, a pivot, etc. The team assembles and examines existing products and/or systems, and by leveraging their diverse knowledge and skillsets, ideates and executes improvements."

It takes a village

Not only does it take your immediate team for a company to be successful, it also takes resources outside of the company. Resources like: education, training and support from valuable programs. Let's call this the "extended team."

Your extended innovation team also needs to share your values and understand your vision in order to help the company move forward. The wrong resource won't help you and will waste your time.

Courtney Queen, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Texas Tech University in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and co-founder of Advanced Codex Solutions, referred to the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps as one valuable program.

"Other agencies have similar programs, but the exact idea is to provide faculty with the knowledge and skills to truly accomplish that final translational research piece to benefit society.," Queen said. "The I-Corps programs are definitely beneficial and helped to move Advanced Codex Solutions forward with the business aspects of our development. I would say, though, the very valuable stages of Ideation are critical for success as well, and shouldn't be overlooked as a part of the process."

Zouridakis thanks the UH Office of Technology Transfer and Innovation for their help. "They are incredibly knowledgeable and helped us clear up several issues related to technology commercialization and intellectual property", he said.

According to Wadhawan, one of the biggest obstacles to starting a business is getting in front of the right people and getting beneficial feedback.

Become a partner

If starting a company from scratch seems like a daunting task, there are other options. Zouridakis says to know your strengths, weaknesses and your limitations because at the end of the day, being a university professor, you don't have a lot of time outside of the classroom. Also, according to Zouridakis, your access to resources may be limited and you may not even have the knowledge to know how to go about achieving your idea.

"So, if an external investor wants to license your IP, develop it further, and commercialize it with you as a partner, please let go of your 'baby' — yes, you could develop your idea better and make it match your vision exactly, but you need to make sure you can commit the time, the resources, and the effort needed all within a short period of time. Wishful thinking does not count," Zouridakis said.

He also notes that "patience is a virtue; be persistent, be ready for rejection, and embrace failure; but never lose sight of the goal."

What's the big idea?

Teamwork really does make the dream work.

If you're a faculty member in academia and you're thinking about starting your own company, make sure you build a great innovation team that shares your values, understands your vision and wants to see the company succeed. Even with a strong team behind you, it may be beneficial to seek outside resources to help push your business forward. Also, if being a professor is already enough work for you, consider an external investor that can license your IP.

No matter what you do, as long as you have a good team to support you, you'll be okay.

------

This article originally appeared on the University of Houston's The Big Idea. Cory Thaxton, the author of this piece, is the communications coordinator for The Division of Research.

Teamwork can make the dream work, but lack of a solid team can be a startup's downfall. Pexels

Here's what Houston startups need to keep in mind when building their teams

Guest column

The top two reasons for startup failure are no market need and running out of money, respectively. But the third reason for failure is not having the right team in place. Like market need, evaluating the management team is on virtually every venture capitalist's list of what they look for in their target investments and you need to get it right.

It is well known that new technologies have a limited window of opportunity to succeed and there are rarely second chances, whether choosing the right strategy, market, customers, partners, or raising rounds of financing. If a particular window is missed a chance to pivot may be available, but that typically requires a good, experienced and nimble team that is right for the overall opportunity.

Luck and timing are factors largely out of your control in a startup, but good-to-great teams are capable of dealing with fast changing conditions or lessons learned along the way.

There's not one "right team"

It is easy to say you need the right team, but the same team is not the right team for every startup. Any team needs some basic skills, and of course have the ability to deliver a solution to meet its customer's needs.

In addition to a diverse technical team, a startup needs different skill sets, including various business, professional and soft skills. It is obvious that software is different than medical devices, but within "software" there are a wide variety of skills needed from user interface to security and everything in between. Within medical devices, the variety ranges beyond technology from working with the FDA to medical reimbursement.

Similarities between standard business processes like customer billing, collections and capital asset management often do not vary much across some otherwise pretty diverse businesses. On top of that, the needs of the team change over time as startups progress from concept, to prototype development to launch and through growth phases.

Having experience with many different startups, I have had some recurring team members with whom I worked with again in my next venture. I have also experienced significant turnover of individuals and growth within individuals that where ready for a new challenge to keep them motivated. The right team varies from venture to venture.

Know your industry

One lesson is to have a few cornerstone roles in the organization. First learned in my consulting days, a talented team member might serve in a kind of cornerstone role where you know that job is "solved" and you will not have to worry about it. You then complement and build around him, adding more experience in a complementary role if the first individual has raw talent and enthusiasm. You would add young talent with plenty of room for growth around an experienced individual that has the ability to mentor those around them. No one way exists to create a good team, other than the best practice of mixing experience, talent and diversity in creative ways based on who based on availability.

However, patterns should be identified and assessed to complement customers when deep engagement is a key part of your model or with partners, distributors, channels, or other strategic parts of your extended business model. Some customers will accept less experienced staff; others will not. Some markets can be targeted successfully by inexperienced sales or customer service representatives, while others require field experience or at a minimum extensive targeted training.

Finding support

Beyond patterns, consider some other best practices that are appropriate for various markets; for example, the risk incurred by having an inexperienced FDA process lead in an FDA regulated product. Having little real experience with FDIC, SEC or similar relevant federal or state agencies creates a lot of risk in FinTech companies. In any startup, some areas can be easily contracted out while others need to be core internal strengths, even if developed over time.

That last word is key, the "time" component of startups. Early stages of a startup have parallels to my consulting days. It is a project that is managed like any other project, balancing the big three assets: resources, money and time. Any project is a balancing act of acquiring and managing those three assets, at least when you take out administrative details like payroll and the like. The next stage is more operational in nature, whether stabilizing operations or managing for growth, but it is common for a startup to have two or more CEOs between founding and exit as needs change.

Since VIC primarily is focused on university technology startups, the inventor is often a university researcher with decades of experience in the field of the invention. We follow a best practice of bringing in one of our senior team members as CEO, an experienced business savvy entrepreneur who complements the inventor well in those early technology de-risking phases.

We support those key team members with a shared service team to handle finance, accounting, legal, websites and more, outsourcing specific areas of expertise like intellectual property in a given technical area. We then fill out gaps with select hires. Over time, we work ourselves out of a job when the technology has progressed to a point that different skills are needed, such as handing off to a growth-stage CEO.

------

James Y. Lancaster is the Texas branch manager for Arkansas-based VIC Technology Venture Development. Lancaster, who lives in College Station, oversees business there, in Dallas, and in Houston.

There's no "I" in team, but getting your coworkers on the same "we" perspective can be tough. Here's why it's important, according to Rice University's research. Pexels

Rice University research shows what your company can learn from gamers about teamwork

Houston Voices

You just got a promotion — along with a brand-new work team whose members barely speak to one another. But first-rate cooperation is essential if you're going to deliver for your client. So you decide to spend a month getting to know each of your workers.

One is competent but bitter, frustrated by years of small mistakes by a colleague, mistakes that add to her own workload. Another, the one making the mistakes, seems so distracted he may as well be working at another company. Others have their own quirks. And to make matters worse, another department is set to merge its employees with your creaky, cranky team in a few months. How are you going to understand all these individuals, much less get them into shape as a unit?

For many managers, training and reading can help provide guidance. Others may hire an outside consultant and resort to team-building activities. But where does that outside expertise — not to mention training and reading — come from? It's based on academic research.

Rice Business professor Utpal Dholakia and colleagues René Algesheimer of the University of Zurich and Richard P. Bagozzi of the University of Michigan are among the scholars updating what we know about the dynamics of group decisions. Starting with classic group behavior theory, the scholars developed a series of sociologically-based models for analyzing small teams.

To better understand the existing shared intentions and attachment between teammates, Dholakia and his colleagues used a novel set of questions to survey 277 teams of computer gamers, each comprised of three people. They ran the survey responses through variations of a classic model called the Key Informant, which depends on the observations of group members about the social relationships inside a group.

Next, the researchers applied a sociological theory called Plural Subject Theory, focused on what's known as "we-attitude." That's exactly what it sounds like: verbally and actively treating an endeavor as a group project.

The core of this theory, the notion that successful teams frequently use collective pronouns when they discuss themselves and cognitively conceive of themselves as "we," has been heavily studied. Groups whose members think in terms of "we" act more cohesively and are measurably more committed to collectively reaching their goal.

To enhance the way these attitudes are measured, Dholakia created multiple variations of a new model. These differ from previous models because they include information not just from a "key informant," but from every member of a group. The researcher asks group members questions about themselves, their impressions of others in the group, their impressions about how others in the group think of each member and impressions about the group as a whole. This longer, more elaborate approach offers fresh insights about a group's shared consciousness — which provides a valuable new research outcome.

The professors found that this revision of classic key informant model generally worked the best of the various group-analysis models they tested — even improving on the original key informant approach. Future researchers, Dholakia notes, should consider the context of the team situation to decide which configuration of members is best to analyze.

So the next time you find yourself nonplussed by a chaotic group dynamic at work, remember you are in time-honored company — and that help is out there. By updating the key informant model, Dholakia and his colleagues have added to the analytical toolbox something that can help whip that team into shape. Whether it's an army of accountants or a network of hospital workers, Dholakia writes, the first step to creating a real team is analyzing which intentions they truly share.

------

This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom.

Utpal Dholakia is the George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Rice lands $15M U.S. Army award to launch next-gen wireless research center

defense funding

The U.S. Army Research Office has awarded Rice University $15 million to establish a new center for next-generation sensing and communications.

The five-year research center—dubbed the Center for Large Aperture Secure Sensing, Imaging and Communications (CLASSIC)—will unite researchers from universities and national laboratories to develop advanced antenna technologies for future wireless systems. Edward Knightly, the Sheafor-Lindsay Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice, will lead the center that “combines expertise in wireless networking, antennas, radar, artificial intelligence, circuits and physics to address growing demands on wireless systems,” according to Rice.

“The challenges we’re tackling require advances that span physics, hardware, communications and computing," Knightly said in a news release. “By combining those strengths in a single center, we can accelerate the development and demonstration of technologies that would not be possible through individual efforts alone.”

Joining Knightly will be Ashutosh Sabharwal of Rice, Sensen Li of the University of Texas at Austin, Hou-Tong Chen of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Danijela Cabric of UCLA, Josep M. Jornet and Tommaso Melodia of Northeastern University, Daniel M. Mittleman of Brown University, and Willie Padilla of Duke University.

Industry partners include Booz Allen Hamilton, Intel, Keysight, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, Qualcomm and Raytheon.

CLASSIC researchers will investigate how large-scale antenna arrays (ELSAAs) can expand the capabilities of wireless systems where technology is limited.

ELSAAs use thousands of coordinated antenna elements to direct radio waves. Researchers aim to develop ways to use the technology to help maintain steady communication when signals are blocked or disrupted and to detect and generate detailed images of concealed objects.

Along with ELSAAs, the center will work to develop sensing techniques for threat detection, study wireless jamming and build resilient high-speed wireless networks. Researchers will ultimately validate the technology in labs and via drone-based field trials.

CLASSIC will also work on developing an AI-driven modeling framework that will simulate complex electromagnetic environments in real time.

“This award demonstrates Rice’s leadership in tackling complex national research challenges through collaboration across disciplines and institutions,” David Sholl, executive vice president for research at Rice, added in the release.

UH scores $18M NIH grant for chronic disease research

research funding

The University of Houston has received a coveted $18.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to launch a program to address the root causes of chronic disease.

Only 22 institutions nationwide receive this NIH award, and the 5-year process aligns with the newly established UH Health’s mission to expand healthcare innovations in Texas and beyond. The initiative will be housed in the UH Population Health department.

"This generous funding allows us to directly confront the root causes of chronic illness that place a heavy burden on so many families," Dr. Jonathan McCullers, vice president for health affairs at UH, said in a news release. "With the recent launch of UH Health, we have an unprecedented opportunity to translate scientific discovery into healthier outcomes for our communities by bringing together experts from across the university to improve health where it matters most.”

Through the program, UH researchers from different areas of expertise will work together to address the challenges of chronic illness by looking at biological, social and behavioral factors.

According to the university, chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, strokes and others are the leading cause of illness, disability and death in the U.S. They account for 90 percent of the nation’s $5.3 trillion in annual healthcare spending.

Bettina Beech, chief of population health and translational science at UH, serves as principal investigator for the program.

“Chronic disease management largely happens during the 8,700 hours each year that people are not visiting their healthcare provider,” Beech added in the news release. “While healthcare is indispensable, it only accounts for 20 percent of how health is created — genetics accounts for another 10 percent, and the other 70 percent is determined by behavior, social conditions and environment.”

With the funds from the grant, UH will also be able to expand research infrastructure, add to community partnerships, support complementary research, and invest in early-career investigators, according to the news release. UH also aims to develop solutions that could help ease the economic burden of chronic disease.

Report: Where Texas ranks among best and worst states to live in 2026

Texas Talk

After earning its worst-ever ranking last year, Texas has improved slightly on an evaluation of the best states to live, but it's still at the bottom of the pack.

Each year, WalletHub's analysts compare all 50 states using 51 livability metrics to measure their affordability, economy, education and health, quality of life, and safety. Factors that were weighed include the cost of living, homeownership rates, population and income growth rates, wealth gaps, public school system quality, road quality, crime rates, and many others.

The Lone Star State landed at No. 36 in 2026, making it the 15th worth state to live right now. That's on par with its 2024 ranking, and it's a two-spot improvement over its 2025 performance.

While Texas residents can brag about living in a state with the No. 1 highest number of restaurants per capita and the 7th best quality of life in the country, that's about it. Texas earned middling-to-poor scores among the four remaining livability rankings: safety (No. 33), affordability (No. 35), economy (No. 37), and education and health (No. 40).

Here's how Texas fared in other nationwide rankings in the study:

  • No. 27 – Income Growth
  • No. 30 – Housing Costs
  • No. 39 – Percentage of Population in Poverty
  • No. 42 – Percentage of Adults in Fair or Poor Health
  • No. 46 – Homeownership Rate
  • No. 49 – Percentage of Population Aged 25 and Older with a High School Diploma or Higher
  • No. 48 – Average Weekly Work Hours
  • No. 50 – Percentage of Insured Population

Texas has a lot of work to do to improve its livability for all of its residents, but especially for women, according to several other 2026 WalletHub studies. Texas is the fourth-worst state for women, the ninth-worst state for working mothers, and the seventh-worst place to have a baby based on limited access to maternal and pediatric healthcare.

At the very bottom of the report is New Mexico, ranking 50th overall, with Louisiana (No. 49), Mississippi (No. 48), Alaska (No. 47), and Arkansas (No. 46) rounding out the bottom five.

After holding on as the No. 1 best state to live for a few years in a row, Massachusetts now ranks No. 4 and was overtaken by Idaho (No. 1), New Jersey (No. 2), and Wisconsin (No. 3). New Hampshire rounds out the top five best states to live.

WalletHub's top 10 best states to live in 2026 are:

  • No. 1 – Idaho
  • No. 2 – New Jersey
  • No. 3 – Wisconsin
  • No. 4 – Massachusetts
  • No. 5 – New Hampshire
  • No. 6 – Wyoming
  • No. 7 – Utah
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Pennsylvania
  • No. 10 – Florida
---

This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

View All Listings