Innovation and entrepreneurship education and training is gradually appearing as part of medical school curriculum reform intended to graduate 21st Century doctors who can win the 4th industrial revolution. The offerings include workshops, seminars, elective or required courses, certificates and degree programs that are included as part of , or, during the entire traditional four-year curriculum.
Introductory entrepreneurship courses for medical students must take into account the primary basic science and clinical workload demanded of students, faculty development, promotion and tenure issues, compliance with accreditation criteria and the various business and entrepreneurial backgrounds of first year students, as well as variations in the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies of incoming students and their personas.
Consequently, the learning objectives of an introductory course should be to :
- Understand the goals and objectives of sickcare entrepreneurship and its unique requirements and ecosystems
- Be able to navigate the various biomedical and clinical innovation pathways
- Create a plan to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies to be successful
- In addition to education, know how to get resources, networks, mentors, peer support and non-clinical guidance
- Know how to address the challenges of intrapreneurship and working in their regional and organizational ecosystems.
Entrepreneurship involved three basic steps:
- Vision: Understand the need and to refine the value-creation hypothesis.
- Test: Identify the unmet need and hypothesis for differentiation/impact of their solution and work to gather market feedback and evaluate the business model.
- Launch: Develop a plan for value creation with milestones and launch, disseminate or implement the offering or intervention and sustain its growth and adoption
As such, modules in the introductory entrepreneurship course for medical students might include:
- What is physician entrepreneurship and why is it important?
- What are the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies required?
- How to build a personal and professional development plan
- The biomedical and clinical innovation roadmap
- Value proposition design, design thinking and creating and validating a business model
- How to test business ideas
- How to execute a go to market strategy and overcome the barriers to adoption, dissemination and implementation
- Non-clinical career development
- Introduction to intellectual property
- Introduction to regulatory affairs
- Introduction to reimbursement and the business of medical entrepreneurship
- Finding seed stage funding and other early stage resources
- Organizational and regional ecosystems and champions
- Opportunities to get more advanced education and development
- Digital health entrepreneurship
- Customer journey mapping
- Competition analysis
- B2B and B2C sales
- How to calculate the return on experience
- Sales metrics made easy
- Design thinking
- Digital health regulatory affairs
- Leading high performance teams
- Why and how you should create a logic map
- How to create stakeholder personas
Many of these modules are offered online, often for free, so it enables new concepts in pedagogy we have learned during the pandemic.https://www.linkedin.com/embeds/publishingEmbed.html?articleId=9064035313761214518
Entrepreneurship in the US is dying, particularly in rural communities. However, the COVID pandemic has created new opportunities to achieve the quintuple aims. Whether the outcomes become a permanent part of the practice of medicine or fade will depend, in part, on how we fill the pipeline with medical entrepreneurs, starting if not with premeds (or even sooner), then with medical students early in their education and training.