Every Last Word

Dallas Innovates’ signature series capturing what leaders across North Texas are saying — in their own words — about innovation, impact, and what’s next.

The Last Word: Dallas Mayor Invites Kansas City Chiefs To Move Back to Dallas

by | Apr 4, 2024
Kansas City Chiefs fans love their football team—but they hate taxes more. Jackson County, Mo., residents voted down a proposed 40-year, three-eighths of a cent sales tax that would have helped fund an $800 million renovation of Arrow Stadium. Now Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson has invited the Chiefs to come back home to Dallas.
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The Last Word: NPower CEO on Offering Path2TECH Software Developer Training for Dallas Women from Under-Resourced Communities
by | Apr 3, 2024
The New York-based nonprofit NPower has launched Path2TECH, which it calls "the first data-driven tech training course designed to help 2.7M women from under-resourced communities across the U.S. transfer existing skills from current tech-enabled jobs into pure tech positions." Classes for the program began in March in Dallas and other cities.
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The Last Word: Re:wild’s Barney Long on Partnering with Dallas-Based Colossal To Save Species Facing Extinction
by | Mar 29, 2024
Long's Austin-based Re:wild and Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences have announced a new partnership to accelerate global efforts "to save species on the brink of extinction, search for lost species, and restore key habitats for species recovery and rewilding."
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The Last Word: Dallas Sports Commission’s Monica Paul On World Cup Strategy — ‘Like an Onion We’re Still Peeling’
by | Mar 28, 2024
NTXIA's new Urban Resilience Fellowship Program, launched in partnership with UT Arlington and UT Dallas, connects students from universities and higher education institutions across Dallas-Fort Worth with community and industry partners. The pioneering initiative "aims to nurture emerging leaders and equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to address critical challenges facing the North Texas community."
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The Last Word: NTXIA’s Jennifer Sanders on the New Urban Resilience Fellowship

by | Mar 26, 2024
NTXIA's new Urban Resilience Fellowship Program, launched in partnership with UT Arlington and UT Dallas, connects students from universities and higher education institutions across Dallas-Fort Worth with community and industry partners. The pioneering initiative "aims to nurture emerging leaders and equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to address critical challenges facing the North Texas community."
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The Last Word: enCore Energy’s William Sheriff on Producing Uranium in Texas and Beyond To Support Nuclear Energy
by | Mar 25, 2024
Today, "the newest uranium producer in the United States" ventured to the heart of New York City to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq and hold its first-ever Investor Day.
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The Last Word: Hudson Nguyen on His High School Team Beating the U.S. Coast Guard Academy at the 2024 RoboBoat Competition
by | Mar 22, 2024
Last month in Sarasota, Florida, the 17th Annual International RoboBoat competition featured 15 university teams from the U.S. Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Turkey—and a single high school team from right here in North Texas: the Arlington Martin High School Seals (short for science, engineering, autonomous, learning). 
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The Last Word: The DRC’s Jarrad Toussant on the New DFW Health Care and IT Talent Pipeline Portal
To help fill those jobs, the DRC—with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies—recently launched a new workforce development tool called the DFW Health Care and IT Talent Pipeline Portal. The online tool provides "expansive, up-to-date data on the supply of and demand for talent for middle-skill jobs."
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The Last Word: Live Happy’s Deborah Heisz on Wednesday’s International Day of Happiness

by | Mar 19, 2024
Wednesday March 20 is the International Day of Happiness. Established by the United Nations in 2012, the day promotes happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings, in their families, and in their communities. But for Heisz's Dallas-based media company Live Happy, that's the goal 365 days of the year.
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The Last Word: DFW Airport’s Paul Puopolo on Offering Air Taxi Services by Early 2026
by | Mar 18, 2024
Puopolo told Cities Today that leaders at DFW Airport have "identified a location and are developing our strategy" for moving air taxis forward—and upward—in the region. 
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The Last Word: Canyon Ranch’s Mark Rivers On the Demand for Fitness and the Wellness Wave
In 2022, we told you about two next-gen, robotics-packed Walmart facilities that were coming to Lancaster, just south of Dallas: a 1.5 million-square-foot automated fulfillment center and a 730,000 square-foot automated grocery distribution center. The first opened last year and the second is still under construction. When it's completed, it will complete a trifecta of transformation in the region, including a retrofitted 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center in Sanger, north of Denton.
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The Last Word: Walmart’s Dave Guggina on Reinventing Company’s Supply Chain in DFW
by | Mar 13, 2024
In 2022, we told you about two next-gen, robotics-packed Walmart facilities that were coming to Lancaster, just south of Dallas: a 1.5 million-square-foot automated fulfillment center and a 730,000 square-foot automated grocery distribution center. The first opened last year and the second is still under construction. When it's completed, it will complete a trifecta of transformation in the region, including a retrofitted 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center in Sanger, north of Denton.
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The Last Word: Dude Perfect’s Coby Cotton on Moving to a New $3M Frisco HQ This Summer

by | Mar 11, 2024
Dude Perfect is about to move into a new stepping stone: a $3 million new HQ in Jerry Jones' Star Business Park in Frisco, leaving behind their Frisco HQ 10 minutes to the south, where they've shot videos for the last seven years. 
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The Last Word: IOOGO’s Kristy Alballero On the ‘ALL-Women’ Award Winners at The DEC Network’s State of Entrepreneurship 2024
Today is International Women's Day, and many women entrepreneurs across North Texas are still basking in the glow of something that happened Thursday night: As Alballero said in her post, The DEC Network's 2024 State of Entrepreneurship event featured an all-star cast of women among its entrepreneur award winners.
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The Last Word: Monica Christopher on Her New Role as President of TWU’s Dallas Campus
by | Mar 7, 2024
Christopher has held key fundraising and relationship building posts over the past 25 years at Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Morning News, and WFAA, and is the the former chair of the Dallas Regional Chamber’s Leadership Dallas Alumni. On February 1, she became the inaugural president of TWU's Dallas campus, the T. Boone Pickens Institute of Health Sciences-Dallas Center, located in an eight-story, 190,000-square-foot building in the heart of the Southwestern Medical District.
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The Last Word: Sloan Capital’s John Sloan on the Sale of Dallas’ 117-Year-Old AC Horn to German Company
Dallas-based M&A advisory firm Sloan Capital advised the 117-year-old Dallas company AC Horn in its late-February sale to Probat Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Germany-based Probat S. 
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