Introduction to Entrepreneurship for Medical Students

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.

Here is some advice to a medical student entrepreneur.

Here’s how to create medical student entrepreneurs.

Effective medical student entrepreneurs have these traits.

Here is a medical student guide to entrepreneurship.

Here is how entrepreneurship education and training has evolved over the years.

Consequently, the learning objectives of an introductory course should be to :

1. Understand the goals and objectives of sickcare entrepreneurship and its unique requirements and ecosystems
2. Be able to navigate the various biomedical and clinical innovation pathways
3. Create a plan to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies to be successful
4. In addition to education, know how to get resources, networks, mentors, peer support and non-clinical guidance
5. 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:

1. What is physician entrepreneurship and why is it important?
2. What are the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies required?
3. How to build a personal and professional development plan
4. The biomedical and clinical innovation roadmap
5. Value proposition design, design thinking and creating and validating a business model
6. How to test business ideas
7. How to execute a go to market strategy and overcome the barriers to adoption, dissemination and implementation
8. Non-clinical career development
9. Introduction to intellectual property
10. Introduction to regulatory affairs
11. Introduction to reimbursement and the business of medical entrepreneurship
12. Finding seed stage funding and other early stage resources
13. Organizational and regional ecosystems and champions
14. Opportunities to get more advanced education and development
15. Digital health entrepreneurship
16. Customer journey mapping
17. Competition analysis
18. B2B and B2C sales
19. How to calculate the return on experience
20. Sales metrics made easy
21. Design thinking
22. Digital health regulatory affairs
23. Leading high performance teams
24. Why and how you should create a logic map
25. 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.