Lawrence Schwartz — CEO of Trivie, a tech-enabled workforce training solution — shares how employees forgetting training is one of the biggest challenges for businesses. Photo via Getty Images

Forgetting is the hobgoblin of businesses everywhere. Globally, more than $300 billion is spent annually by companies hoping to train their employees to do their jobs successfully and safely. Yet, learning professionals know that people will forget 80 percent or more of what they learned after 30 to 90 days unless it's reinforced.

It's a human biology problem — people forget. However, if that were the only issue, it would have been solved long ago. Instead, it's a holistic issue that includes how people learn and forget, how people engage with training, and how knowledge gaps are identified and addressed across entire organizations.

How do we get people to remember what we need them to know to do their job more effectively? And how do we do it without it taking up so much of their time that training becomes impossibly expensive?

Therein lies the problem. Neuroscientists have done extensive research on how the brain remembers things long-term, and it's not what most people think.

We've grown up in a culture of cramming. Review the content over and over right before a test, take the test, pass it, and you're done. Check the box. Unfortunately, your brain is done with that material too, and over time, it will purge itself of that information unless you do something about it.

The act of forgetting allows our brains to strengthen their neurological pathways to help us remember. This is called "retrieval practice" and according to Dr. Henry Roediger, one of the authors of the book, Make It Stick: "Retrieval practice via quizzes spaced out over time helps to consolidate knowledge and keep it on employees' 'mental fingertips,' so it is easy to access when needed." In essence, you re-introduce something learned so that the brain "recalls" it, and if done enough over a certain period, it is more likely that people will remember this information longer.

With today's technology, we can automate spaced repetition. Artificial intelligence can predict when people will forget and proactively nudge employees to avoid creating knowledge gaps across organizations. Delivering information in a personalized way, such that every learner has their own proficiency map, enables knowledge retention with very little time expenditure.

It's human nature that when someone knows more, they are more confident in their abilities. This translates to better performance across nearly all use cases within a business. Top salespeople know their product like the back of their hands to identify solutions for customers quickly. The best customer service teams don't just reference knowledge bases; they are familiar with the product, processes, or services that allow them to be responsive and think holistically about issues. The safest work environments are a product of employees knowing what they need to do to keep themselves, and each other, safe. Knowledge retention powers high-performing people and organizations.

Forgetting can never be eliminated. Rather, businesses that leverage forgetting as opportunities to strengthen their people's knowledge will create a culture of continuous learning. Employees will feel more empowered and confident. Knowledge silos will be broken down, and the analog ways that knowledge was retained across peer interactions will become digital. An open network of knowledge will emerge and supplement our brains, making what was once a weakness in human biology, forgetting, an opportunity to remember.

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Lawrence Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Texas-based Trivie.

Trivie has closed a $5 million investment round led by Houston-based Cottonwood Venture Partners. Photo via Trivie.com

Houston investment firm leads Texas startup's $5M series A round

money moves

A Texas-based tech startup that has created an artificial intelligence-enabled tool that gamifies corporate training and education has closed its most recent funding round thanks to a Houston investor.

Trivie as announced its $5 million series A investment round led by Houston-based Cottonwood Venture Partners, an investment firm that has a portfolio of technology companies that are providing digital solutions within the energy industry. Trivie will use the new funds to scale its product and expand across industries, from energy and manufacturing to hospitality, healthcare, consumer goods, and more.

"The Trivie team's success to date has been remarkable and we are humbled to partner with them to expand Trivie's reach as organizations increasingly look to maximize knowledge retention, particularly as it relates to health and safety," says Jeremy Arendt, managing partner of CVP, in a news release.

Now, as more employees are working from home than ever before, relevant training is crucial and at the top of mind for business leaders. Trivie's clients include Subway, Phillips66, Anheuser-Busch, to name a few.

"At Trivie, our mission is to ensure that every employee at every organization can be at their very best because what they have been taught, they remember, and what they have said is understood," says Lawrence Schwartz, CEO, and co-founder at Trivie, in a news release. "We are extremely excited to partner with Cottonwood Venture Partners to help us expand our footprint in the Fortune 1000 and to continue to execute on that mission."

One of Trivie's founders, Leland Putterman, who is based in Houston, first had the idea for a consumer-facing trivia game 18 years ago. When the app rolled out in 2013, it garnered more than three million downloads. As COVID-19 has brought new compliance guidelines to the forefront of every industry, Trivie was quick to make the CDC's coronavirus guidelines available to all of its clients for no additional charge to be used across their entire employment bases.

Additionally, Trivie prioritizing its user's ability to connect in a time of social distancing and working from home.

"The only way to maintain that company culture and close communication with confidence is to use something like Trivie," Putterman previously tells InnovationMap. "There's no feedback loop right now. The only way to bridge that gap is to have something like Trivie that's the glue."

This week's Houston innovators to know includes Aleece Hobson of HX Venture Fund, Leland Putterman of Trivie, and Eleonore Cluzel of gBETA Houston. Photos courtesy

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of who's who in Houston innovation include the HX Venture Fund's newest team member, a startup founder whose app is gamifying corporate training, and a Houston accelerator leader who's pivoted to digital.

Aleece Hobson, venture partner at the HX Venture Fund

Aleece Hobson joined the HX Venture Fund as venture partner. Photo courtesy of HXVF

The HX Venture Fund has expanded its portfolio of venture capital finds its invested in, and with that came a new team member for the fund of funds. Managing director Sandy Guitar — who runs the fund with Guillermo Borda — brought on Houston native Aleece Hobson as venture partner.

"Aleece joining is a phenomenal step for us — a dedicated resource and venture partner on activation," says Guitar on the hire. "I think it speaks to the seriousness of purpose we have to make this not just an investment platform, but one that moves the needle on Houston." Read more.

Leland Putterman, co-founder of Trivie Inc.

Trivie, which gamifies corporate training, has launched a new way for employees to connect with remote learning amid the pandemic. Photo via Trivie.com

Texas-based corporate training tool Trivie already had many clients with needs for safety training, COVID-19 has brought new compliance guidelines to the forefront of every industry. Currently, Trivie has made the CDC's coronavirus guidelines available to all of its clients for no additional charge to be used across their entire employment bases.

Additionally, with most of America's workforce working from home, Putterman expressed that it's common for employees to feel disconnected.

"The only way to maintain that company culture and close communication with confidence is to use something like Trivie," he says. "There's no feedback loop right now. The only way to bridge that gap is to have something like Trivie that's the glue." Read more.

Eléonore Cluzel, director of gBETA Houston

Eléonore Cluzel, director of gBETA Houston, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share how the cohort has been going — and to introduce each member of the inaugural cohort. Photo courtesy of gBETA

Things aren't going according to plan for Eléonor Cluzel, who is running the inaugural gBETA Houston cohort virtually. While it isn't ideal, Cluzel shares on the Houston Innovator's Podcast how she's adapted the program for digital — as well as introduces the five Houston companies in the program.

"Going virtual was a really good pivot on our end. I think that the cohort has adjusted very well," Cluzel says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "It is tough. They put tremendous effort into it and I'm proud to be working with them." Read more.

Trivie, which gamifies corporate training, has launched a new way for employees to connect with remote learning amid the pandemic. Photo via Trivie.com

Houston founder's corporate training app shifts to enhance remote learning for employees

there's an app for that

How much of corporate training do employees actually remember? Texas-based Trivie, a training reinforcement app, sought to not only answer that question, but change the results entirely. Using adaptive learning and gamification, the Trivie app is reshaping online learning while the world adapts to remote working in a global pandemic.

According to Gallup Panel data, 62 percent of Americans currently say they have worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic. In a connected yet socially distanced environment, corporations are choosing to automate remote learning and disseminate critical COVID-19 guidelines with the help of Trivie.

One of Trivie's founders, Leland Putterman, who is based in Houston, first had the idea for a consumer-facing trivia game 18 years ago. When the app rolled out in 2013, it garnered more than three million downloads. Like anything in technology, App Store games were diversifying. Competing applications were deviating into in-app purchases — a move Putterman's app hadn't planned.

Rather than sink under the pressures of an unfit revenue model, the founders pivoted to a more fruitful investment in an untapped space: corporate training. After receiving multiple emails from users asking if developers had ever thought of using the app for company training, Putterman jumped into research on information retention and learned that trivia vastly benefits human memory.

With a new business plan and research backed by neuroscientists, the Trivie app launched in 2016. Reaching a broad list of organizations with five to over 40,000 users, Trivie has generated the praise and trust of business goliaths such as Subway, Unilever, and Anheuser-Busch. The app has been used to roll out onboarding, marketing training, safety protocols, sales information, remote learning and more.

"The vast majority of companies and organizations do nothing after a training event," he says, adding that, according to Trivie's own research, the app has found 50 to 75 percent of people had forgotten workplace education within a month. "It makes training one of the least effective business processes out there because everybody knows people don't remember their training unless it gets reinforced."

What if the secret to remembering is forgetting? Studies have shown that re-learning information over time strengthens memory recall.

"The way our solution works is very unique in that we want you to forget so you can re-remember again. The process of re-remembering is what pushes things into durable memory," explains Putterman.

When a company sets up a training on the Trivie app, the program serves each employee personalized training refreshers over time that are balanced with the retention levels of each unique learner. Using adaptive learning, the app prompts employees to remember previous facts until they master the subject.

"The AI [artificial intelligence] on the backend predicts when you're going to forget again, and it automates the whole thing," Putterman says.

In a Trivie control group, half of the test subjects used Trivie and half received basic employee training. Putterman stated the Trivie users typically have 95 percent retention after a month while non-Trivie users show less than 60 percent retention.

Employers can see the results of each Trivie assessment, pinpointed down to individual questions — a feature that is especially crucial for compliance and safety protocol. One of Trivie's university clients published a training on Title IX, where students passed yet 65 percent missed the question: "Whose responsibility is it to gain consent during a sexual encounter?"

When the university received the results, "they were able to see down to that level of detail—and that knowledge gap is pretty darn important," explains Putterman.

"Training is important but nowadays it's mission-critical," he says.

While Trivie already had many clients with needs for safety training, COVID-19 has brought new compliance guidelines to the forefront of every industry. Currently, Trivie has made the CDC's coronavirus guidelines available to all of its clients for no additional charge to be used across their entire employment bases.

Putterman acknowledges the pitfalls of sending out a corporate memo only to hear crickets.

"In a Trivie platform you would send a video, PDF, or word document via Trivie. You'd know people opened it up and after they're required to take a quiz so you know they understand what was in the message," Putterman explains.

An internal discussion board also allows company employees to discuss why the communication is essential to the organization. Another prominent feature of the app is a customizable survey.

"You know as well as I do that there's a ton of anxiety out there [about the coronavirus]. Wouldn't it be nice to push out a survey and then have a discussion around how people are dealing with it?" he questions.

With most of America's workforce working from home, Putterman expressed that it's common for employees to feel disconnected.

"The only way to maintain that company culture and close communication with confidence is to use something like Trivie," he says. "There's no feedback loop right now. The only way to bridge that gap is to have something like Trivie that's the glue."

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Houston researchers make headway on affordable, sustainable sodium-ion battery

Energy Solutions

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

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This story originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

FAA demands investigation into SpaceX's out-of-control Starship flight

Out of this world

The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into the out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX on May 27.

Tuesday's test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

TMC med-tech company closes $2.5M series A, plans expansion

fresh funding

Insight Surgery, a United Kingdom-based startup that specializes in surgical technology, has raised $2.5 million in a series A round led by New York City-based life sciences investor Nodenza Venture Partners. The company launched its U.S. business in 2023 with the opening of a cleanroom manufacturing facility at Houston’s Texas Medical Center.

The startup says the investment comes on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting clearance to the company’s surgical guides for orthopedic surgery. Insight says the fresh capital will support its U.S. expansion, including one new manufacturing facility at an East Coast hospital and another at a West Coast hospital.

Insight says the investment “will provide surgeons with rapid access to sophisticated tools that improve patient outcomes, reduce risk, and expedite recovery.”

Insight’s proprietary digital platform, EmbedMed, digitizes the surgical planning process and allows the rapid design and manufacturing of patient-specific guides for orthopedic surgery.

“Our mission is to make advanced surgical planning tools accessible and scalable across the U.S. healthcare system,” Insight CEO Henry Pinchbeck said in a news release. “This investment allows us to accelerate our plan to enable every orthopedic surgeon in the U.S. to have easy access to personalized surgical devices within surgically meaningful timelines.”

Ross Morton, managing Partner at Nodenza, says Insight’s “disruptive” technology may enable the company to become “the leader in the personalized surgery market.”

The startup recently entered a strategic partnership with Ricoh USA, a provider of information management and digital services for businesses. It also has forged partnerships with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Florida Health and UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama.