Our Events

Upcoming Events:

Professional Speaker Series (PSS)

The PSS seeks to bring individuals to campus who can speak to both scholars and students, as these speakers’ insights can inform, motivate, and inspire future academic research. The PSS will feature professionals involved in a wide variety of sectors who have exposure to innovation in their respective fields. These speakers do not need to be CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, nor do they need to be Aggies, though that helps. The PSS seeks to find a diverse mix of speakers who can broaden the conversation on innovation and kick-start ideas for research and collaboration among Mays faculty.

Professional Speaker Series: October 28,2020 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Lecture Title: “End the Status Quo: Start an Innovation Revolution.”
Speaker: Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO – Futurethink
Register Here: tx.ag/speakerseries

It’s time to revolutionize how you think and work. Learn to embrace challenge your assumptions to drive real transformation.

Winning innovators embrace change – do you? What holds you and your organization back from better innovating, every day? In too many organizations, we’re stuck in the land of status quo. We’ve forgotten how to think differently, and lack the simple tools to solve problems creatively. The very structures put in place inside organizations to help them grow all too often hold them back. This keynote is an inspirational call to arms: to start a revolution in how we think and how we work. If you want people to approach change differently, you have to help them change their approach.

Professional Speaker Series: November 10,2020 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Lecture Title: “The Startup Mentor – with author Maia Patrick Donohue”
Speaker: Maia Donohue, Senior Facilitator and Director of College Partnerships – 3 Day Startup

Starting a company is the hardest thing you will ever do. From building a prototype, to finding customers in a busy market, launching a startup is even harder if you are a first-time founder.

This book is about how you, as a first-time founder, can leverage great mentors to get your company launched. They can help you learn from their mistakes, raise money, hire the right people, and so much more. But as a founder, it is up to you to make it happen. This book will show you how.

Faculty Speaker Series (FSS)

We selected speakers for each of the seminar series for the Departments of Marketing, Management, Finance, and Computer Science and arranged for them to present to faculty members throughout the academic year.

Innovation Lunch Series (ILS)

This series is a way to connect faculty members from departments all over campus to share their research and receive feedback on thier working papers.

Conferences and Panels

Innovation in Unconventional Drilling
POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

The Mays Innovation Research Center and the Energy Institute at Texas A&M will bring together leading experts from Industry, Academia, and Policy for a one-day conference in downtown Houston. The conference is a unique opportunity for industry executives, leading academics, and policymakers to exchange ideas and to share the most recent research findings in the economics and technical innovations in fracking. Rather than replicating existing academic conferences, we aim to blend economics and technical science in a way that demonstrates value from the combination. Attendees will walk away with insights into the most innovative dimensions of oil & gas having a better understanding of the science and business of unconventional drilling.

Aggie Longhorn Innovation
POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

The Mays Innovation Research Center at Texas A&M  and the UT Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics are will gather scholars from across the nation to focus on the economics, finance, business, and policy of innovation and technology. We aim to spark collaboration between scholars and ignite collaboration in future research.

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Previous Events:

Innovative Lunch Series: February 25, 2020
Lecture Title: “How Do Public Incubators Foster Entrepreneurship? The Effects of Management Practices”
Speaker: Peter Klein, Baylor University

Professional Speaker Series: February 28, 2020
Lecture Title: “Innovation and Regulation in the World of Cryptocurrencies”
Speaker: William Magnuson, Texas A&M University

William Magnuson discussed his newly released book, Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd, the emergence and evolution of the world of blockchain and bitcoin, and what happens when technology runs up against the stubborn realities of law, markets, and human nature.

Professional Speaker Series: February 14, 2020
Lecture Title: “Faith and Innovation”
Speaker: Jay Bruce, John Brown University

Dr. Bruce presented over the importance of a tight social fabric for progress, the social capital and how religion fosters innovation.

Innovative Lunch Series: January 29, 2020
Lecture Title: “Innovation Potential, Insider Sales, and IPO Performance: How Firms Can Mitigate the Negative Effect of Insider Selling”
Speaker: Alina Sorescu, Texas A&M University

Professional Speaker Series: November 22, 2019
Lecture Title: “Bitcoin Maximalism”
Speaker: Michael Flaxman

Michael Flaxman made the case for bitcoin maximalism, sharing his perspectives on the following topics: what bitcoin’s blockchain is, what blockchains fundamentally aren’t, what makes money useful, why clones can’t succeed, and the path of the new bitcoiner.

Professional Speaker Series: October 25, 2019
Lecture: From Blockchain to Data Analytics: An Entrepreneur’s Journey in International Sustainable Supply Chains and Combating Corruption
Speaker: Mr. Hitendra Chaturvedi
Event Description

Lecture by Travis Kling, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Ikigai Asset Management
October 11, 2019

Mr. Kling discussed the barriers and challenges as well as the benefits of Bitcoin to young entrepreneurs and undergraduates at the Mays Business School. Our Center hosted this event. Mr. Kling has a BBA in Accounting and MS in Finance from Texas A&M University.

Faculty Speaker Series: October 4, 2019
Title: “The Innovation and Reporting Consequences of Financial Regulation for Young Life-Cycle Firms”
Speaker: Dr. Abigail Allen

Conference on the Future of Work
September 27, 2019

We co-hosted the Future of Work Conference with the Private Enterprise Research Center at the Texas A&M Hotel and Conference Center on Friday, September 27. Speakers included Susan Houseman (Upjohn Institute for Employment Research), Edward Lazear (Stanford University), John Horton (MT Sloan School of Management), Paul Oyer (Stanford University), and Christopher Stanton (Harvard Business School).

Conference on Infrastructure and Autonomous Driving in Washington, DC
July 25, 2019

Recent research shows that embedding sensors inside infrastructure is a more precise way to guide autonomous driving than the current industry model of basing all sensors inside the vehicle. The conference will discuss and showcase research on autonomous driving at Texas A&M. The goal is to gather scholars, policymakers, legislators, regulators, and the public.

We are co-hosting this event with the University of Florida Transportation Institute and the Brookings Institution. The event will be held at Brookings.

Videos, transcripts, and information.

Lecture by Mr. Rex Eiserer and MG Young, Senior Director of Innovation Strategy at Army Futures Command and Commander of the 75th Innovation Command (respectively)
April 23, 2019
Event Description

BBLS: April 19, 2019
Title: “Endogenous Price War Risks”
Speaker: Wei Wu

Lecture by Charles Brandes
April 18, 2019

Mr. Brandes delivered his presentation “Innovation in Investment Management: A Life of Thinking Differently” to an audience of undergraduates and MBA students.

Starting his career in 1968 as a broker trainee, Mr. Brandes decided to dedicate his practice to value investing soon after a chance yet inspiring meeting with the man who pioneered this time-tested investment philosophy, Benjamin Graham. Considered the father of value investing, Graham authored such books as Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor – groundbreaking insights that, as Mr. Brandes often puts it, “changed my life.”

Following this sage advice, Mr. Brandes would found Brandes Investment Partners in 1974 – with Graham’s enthusiastic support – based on the Graham-and-Dodd value investment tenets. More than 40 years since he founded his eponymous firm, Brandes has never wavered from this straightforward, Graham-and-Dodd approach, building portfolios one company at a time through the firm’s equity and fixed-income strategies to help clients pursue their long-term investment goals.

Mr. Brandes’ accomplishments in the financial services industry – especially in the value investing world – led him to receive two lifetime achievement awards in 2015: one from the London Value Investor Conference; and another from his alma mater Bucknell University, for an outstanding achievement in a chosen profession.

Lecture by Dr. Ashok Gowda, the CEO of Biotex
April 16, 2019

Dr. Gowda delivered a presentation to Korok’s MBA students were he explained the medical industry, how to bring innovative ideas to life, and the risk behind these ideas.

Dr. Gowda is a founder and CEO of the Houston-based medical technology developer and manufacturer, Biotex, Inc. To date, under his direction, the company has raised over $20M in non-dilutive funding, successfully licensed numerous early-stage technologies, spun out three separate companies (Visualase, Inc., Base Pair Biotechnologies, Inc., E-SAFE Medical, Inc.), all of which successfully raised private capital. At Biotex, Dr. Gowda oversees internal development programs as well as partnering activities, where the company works with other entrepreneurs and start-ups to develop and bring novel medical technologies to market.

Previously, Dr. Gowda co-founded and served as Chief Operating Officer at Visualase, Inc., which was acquired by Medtronic for up to $105M in late 2014. Dr. Gowda is an active investor, advisor, and board member for a number of early-stage medical technology companies. Dr. Gowda has served as principal investigator on more than 15 NIH grants, authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts, and is an inventor on more than 20 issued patents. Dr. Gowda received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Bioengineering from Texas A&M University.)

Lecture by Dr. Andy Wilson, the Founder of CapRock Health 
April 11, 2019

Dr. Wilson gave Korok’s MBA students a tour to the CapRock Hospital. After the tour, Dr. Wilson gave a presentation on innovation in the healthcare industry. He spoke about the opportunities and challenges of innovation and entrepreneurship as well as how micro hospitals could shape the future of medical treatment.

Before founding CapRock Health, Dr. Wilson has served as a Medical Director for Traditional Hospital and Freestanding Emergency Departments, The TEEX Paramedic Academy Medical Director, and is the Co-Medical Director for a SWAT Team in Texas. Dr. Wilson also serves as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Texas A&M College of Medicine. Dr. Wilson completed his Emergency Medicine Residency Training at the Texas A&M Scott and White Emergency Medicine Program in Temple, Texas, where he served as the Chief Resident.

Prior to his residency training, Dr. Wilson attended medical school at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, where he graduated with Research Distinction. While attending the University of Iowa, Dr. Wilson was the Student Body President, was nominated for the AMA National Scholar (one of 150 in the nation out of nearly 16,000 medical students), and the Hancher-Finkbine Medallion, The University of Iowa’s most coveted student award given to only one student annually at the University.

Lecture by Dr. Yael Hochberg, a Professor in Entrepreneurship at Rice University
April 5, 2019

Our Center worked with the Department of Finance to host Dr. Yael Hochberg. Dr. Hochberg delivered a lecture on her paper “The Cost of Convenience: Ridehailing and Traffic Fatalities.” This event was for faculty members and Ph.D. candidates. Our Center paid for Dr. Hochberg’s visit.

Lecture by Srinivas Rao, the Founder of Unmistakable Creative
April 4, 2019

Mr. Rao delivered his presentation “Why Creativity is the Precursor of Innovation” to Korok’s MBA class. Mr. Rao is the host-founder of The Unmistakable Creative podcast where he’s interviewed more than 700 people. The podcast has a global audience and averages 40000 downloads per episode. He’s the author of multiple books including the Wall-Street Journal best-seller The Art of Being Unmistakable. Our Center paid for Mr. Rao’s visit.

Eduardo Torrealba
March 29, 2019
Former Director of Engineering at Formlabs
Event Summary

BBLS – March 22, 2019
Title: “Entrepreneurial Orientation and Firm Competitive Repertoire Complexity”
Speaker: Michael Withers

Scott Moscrip
March 1, 2019
Founder and Chairman of Truckstop.com
Event Summary

BBLS – February 22, 2019
Title: “Til death do us part: The relative merits of founder CEOs”
Speaker: Tristan Fitzgerald

Lecture by Dr. Oded Netzer, a Professor of Business at Columbia University
February 8, 2019
Our Center is working with the Department of Marketing to host Dr. Netzer during the 2018-19 academic year. Dr. Netzer has committed to speaking about machine learning on Friday, February 8 from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. in Wehner 190.

Workshop by Mr. Christopher Bishop, a nonlinear, multimodal careerist
How to Succeed at Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet
January 25, 2019

Chris Bishop provided students at Texas A&M with insight into succeeding in the fields of the future. Throughout his life, Chris continuously redeveloped his skills and created new jobs for himself. Chris toured internationally as a musician with artists such as Robert Palmer and Chuck Berry; wrote advertising jingles, including the original “Gimme a Break” Kit Kat jingle; turned a conversation on a train into a twelve-year career at IBM; and now delivers presentations on the future of work around the world.

Each time Chris switched careers, he focused on three fundamental tools for success: Tool Number 1: Voice. Identify your own brand. Invest in what makes you stand out. Frame your persona on your own uniqueness. Tool Number 2: Antenna. Connect your interests to events in the world. Seek sources based on your values and interests that help you stay informed. These sources include magazines, newspapers, blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, or other forms of media. Tool Number 3: Mesh. Share yourself with those who value your skills. LinkedIn is a valuable tool. Expand your network by adding at least five people each week. Reach out to others who share your interests and goals, and join groups to expand your connections. This puts you on the radar of people you would otherwise miss.

Article
Slides

BBLS – November 16, 2018
Title: “Innovation in Internet Resource Management and Security”
Speaker: Jesse Sowell

Lecture by Dr. Peter Klein, a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University
October 31, 2018
Dr. Klein delivered a lecture entitled “Entrepreneurship and Innovation under Knightian Uncertainty” to an audience of faculty members in the Mays Business School. During the lecture, Dr. Klein discussed two of his recent papers: “Entrepreneurial Finance under Knightian Uncertainty” and “Learning by Seconding: Evidence from NSF Rotators.”

Peter G. Klein is W. W. Caruth Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business and Senior Research Fellow at the Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise. He is also Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Management at the Norwegian School of Economics and Carl Menger Research Fellow at the Mises Institute. He directs Baylor’s PhD Program in Entrepreneurship and is currently serving as Program Chair of the Academy of Management’s Entrepreneurship Division.

Klein holds a BA in Economics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Peter’s research focuses on the links between entrepreneurship, strategy, and organization, with application to innovation, diversification, science policy, health care, and public policy. His work has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Rand Journal of Economics, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Management, Managerial and Decision Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics, Sloan Management Review, and other outlets. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Illinois-Missouri Biotechnology Alliance, and other organizations.

Klein is an Associate Editor of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal on the Editorial Boards of many other academic journals. His 2012 book Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment (with Nicolai Foss, Cambridge University Press) won the 2014 Foundation for Economic Education Best Book Prize, and his 2010 book The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur (Mises Institute) has been translated into Chinese and Portuguese. He holds an Honorary Professorship at the Beijing University of Information Science and Technology and has held faculty positions at the University of Missouri, the Copenhagen Business School, the University of Georgia, and Washington University in St. Louis and was a Senior Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers.

BBLS – October 26, 2018
Title: “Effects of Accounting Conservatism on Investment Efficiency and Innovation”
Speaker: Korok Ray

Presentation by Jonathan Ballesteros and Brian Ragone, two executives at Geyser Systems
October 9, 2018
Messrs. Ballesteros and Ragone delivered a presentation entitled “Evidence-Based Innovation & Marketing – Practical Steps toward Products That Sell & Win” to MBA students in the Mays Business School. The presenters were engaging and dynamic, and their product, a portable shower that uses only a gallon of water, could change the camping industry.

Lecture by Dr. Zikas, an Associate Professor and Vice-Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh
September 19, 2018
Dr. Zikas delivered a lecture entitled “Rational Protocol Design: Security Against Incentive-driven Adversaries” to an audience of faculty members and Ph.D. candidates in the College of Engineering. During the lecture, Dr. Zikas presented the “Rational Protocol Design” (RPD) framework, which formally incorporates adversarial incentives into cryptographic protocol design. In a nutshell, RPD models incentive-driven attacks by a “meta-game” between a protocol designer and a protocol attacker, and then shows how proving equilibrium in the above game reduces to a cryptographic optimization problem of finding the solution which best tames any adversary attacking it. Dr. Zikas showcased the benefits of the framework by applying it to various settings, including secure and fait multi-party computation (all parties obtain the result of the computation or nobody does) and blockchain protocols like Bitcoin, showing how knowledge of the attacker’s incentives can be used to circumvent known impossibility results.

Vassilis Zikas is an Associate Professor and Vice-Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is also a Research Fellow (Area Leader: Secure Multiparty Computation) of the blockchain company IOHK. He was previously Assistant Professor at the Computer Science department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Senior Research Associate in Cryptography and Information Security at ETH Zurich, Research Fellow of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral researcher at UCLA and at the University of Maryland. His research has been supported by a career development (Ambizione) grant and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Lecture by Fernando González, President of GP Consumer business at Georgia-Pacific LLC
September 6, 2018
Mr. González discussed innovation at Georgia Pacific and his experience challenging orthodoxy in front of MBA students in the Mays Business School.

Visits to Incubators and Accelerators in Austin and Houston
Summer 2018
In June, we drove to Austin to view SKU, Techstars, Capital Factory, and ATI, and in August, we visited Bunker Labs, Station Houston, and The Cannon in Houston. Seeing these accelerators and incubators in action provided us with a great introduction to state-of-the-art entrepreneurial ecosystems, which require more development on Texas A&M’s campus.

Tour of the Center for Infrastructure Renewal (CIR)
May 30, 2018
Our Center coordinated a visit with Dr. Zachary Grasley, the Director of the CIR. We learned more about the applied research that takes place at the CIR, and we discussed the possibility of hosting events in the CIR’s new conference space. The CIR is located on the RELLIS Campus.

Visit to an AgriLife Research drone lab
May 22, 2018
Our Center coordinated a visit with three of the leading researchers in the UAS Project, or the AgriLife Research Unmanned Aerial Systems Project for Precision Agriculture and High Throughput Field Phenotyping. We met in the Wildlife, Fisheries, and Ecological Sciences Building with Drs. Sorin Popescu, Seth Murray, and Alex Thomasson. The researchers showed us their advanced autonomous drones and provided us with an overview of their research.

Tour of Texas A&M’s High Performance Research Computing’s supercomputer
May 21, 2018
Our Center coordinated a visit for faculty members to view the supercomputer in the Teague Research Center. Faculty members learned ways to supplement their research with the help of the university’s supercomputer.

France Hoang: “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Service: Perspectives from a Veteran Entrepreneur”
April 18, 2018
France Hoang and his family left Saigon ten days before the city fell to Communist forces. He grew up in Tumwater, Washington and attended the United States Military Academy, graduating in the top one percent of his class. After serving as a peacekeeper in Bosnia, France returned to the United States, attended Georgetown Law, and passed the bar exam and CPA exam on back-to-back days. After practicing at Williams & Connolly LLP, he served on the Office of Counsel to the President, and he worked in the White House for two years. France then served as the Executive Officer for a detachment of Green Berets in Afghanistan. He considers leading soldiers in combat to be one of the most fulfilling experiences of his life. After returning to the United States again, France helped found MAG Aerospace, a leading contractor in the field of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. France encouraged people to not be afraid of failure, surround yourself with hard-working, intelligent individuals, and never pass on an opportunity that you could regret when looking back on your life decades down the road. France ended his lecture with a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Charles Brandes: “Entrepreneurship and Investment Management”
April 16, 2018
Charles Brandes is a successful value investor who resides in San Diego, California. If you are unfamiliar with the term “value investing,” think of Warren Buffet and his work with Berkshire Hathaway. In his speech, Charles talked about the importance of having a mentor, but luckily for him, his mentor just happened to be the father of value investing – Benjamin Graham. Charles highlighted the importance of seeking new opportunities when looking into investments. He began working with foreign value investing when there was only outdated information available to the public, and he had to take a leap of faith. He noted that people will become too scared to take action based on the advice they are given, will preventing them from making sound decisions. His example was the stock market, and how the market fluctuations will keep individuals away even when the price is absurdly low. Overall, the content of the lecture emphasized the importance of doing your own research and trusting your results.

Andy Wilson
April 11, 2018
Lectures by Dr. Andy Wilson on innovation in healthcare and emergency medicine on Wednesday, April 11. Dr. Wilson will deliver a lecture in each of Professor Korok Ray’s ACCT 620 classes in Wehner 187. Dr. Wilson is an MD-Managing Partner and is Board Certified in Emergency Medicine. Outside of the ER, Dr. Wilson serves as the Associate Medical Director for the Bryan SWAT Team and the Associate Medical Director for the TEEX Paramedic Academy. Dr. Wilson also serves as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Texas A&M College of Medicine. Dr. Wilson’s greatest joy is spending time with his family. Dr. Wilson has been married to his wife Heidi for nearly 20 years, and they have been richly blessed with three beautiful daughters. The Wilson’s enjoy doing just about anything outside including camping, hiking, and the shooting sports

Autonomous Driving Demonstration
March 30, 2018
The Mays Innovation Research Center is tentatively scheduled to host a demonstration of autonomous driving by the Connected Autonomous Safety Technology Center (CAST) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The CAST’s faculty and staff, who are leading the university’s research on autonomous driving, will provide a full demonstration of automobile and truck platooning at the RELLIS Campus of Texas A&M.
view video here