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.

Here is what the NHS in England has launched to educate and train clinician entrepreneurs.

Suppose you are launching a new medical school. What would be the purpose? How would you define the competencies of graduates, the curriculum map, entrustable professional activities and learning objectives?

If you are an existing medical school, how would you revise your 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: discover, design, develop, deliver, disseminate, determine outcome and impact
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 five basic steps:

• Problem seeking: Understand the need and to refine the value-creation hypothesis.
• Problem solving: Create something
• Solution testing: Identify the unmet need and hypothesis for differentiation/impact of their solution and work to gather market feedback and evaluate the business model.
• Product launching: Develop a plan for value creation with milestones and launch, disseminate or implement the offering or intervention and sustain its growth and adoption
• Exit/harvest value

In other words, you will need to fail it, nail it, scale it and sale it.

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
26. Data analytics and business intelligence
27. Entrepreneurship ethics and professionalism
28. AI ethics and the law
29. How to build an entrepreneurial mindset
30. Understand the similarities and differences between the clinical mindset and the entrepreneurial mindset.
31. Market segmentation
32. Market sizing
33. Cybersecurity
34. Personal financial planning
35. Data literacy
36. Career planning
37. Social entrepreneurship
38. Intrapreneurship
39. Angel investor education and training
40. Customer personas
41. Accelerators, incubators, innovation centers, startup studios
42. Startnership: Minimal viable pilots
43. Edupreneurship
44. Public health entrepreneurship
45. Bootstrapping
46. Medical practice entrepreneurship
47. How to create a corporate culture of innovation
48. How to build your personal brand

Many of these modules are offered online, often for free, so it enables new concepts in pedagogy we have learned during the pandemic.

Here are reasons why there should be no required textbooks for the course. Instead, students should learn by doing, e.g. by participating in a bioentrepreneurship fellowship program specifically designed for medical students or more focused project based learning. Just like Steve Blank exhorts his disciples to "get out of the building", students need to get out of the classroom, either virtually or face to face when possible.

What's more, students should earn what they learn. Whether students are online or in person, I agree with this teacher that their most meaningful learning experiences are those in which they:

1. Are actively engaged
2. Feel responsible for their own learning
3. Have significant control over the experience

Team project based learning is part of that process. Other teaching techniques familiar to students are Entrepreneurship Grand Rounds, Startup M/M conferences and Wall Street Journal Club. Case studies and presentations are second nature to medical professionals.

A four year curriculum map should build on the hierarchy of learning, ultimately resulting in students with an entrepreneurial mindset who can create stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model.

Here is how the University of Colorado School of Medicine has reformed their curriculum. 1st year medical students can now take electives in the first year, including one in healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship.

Here is how the newly created Kansas College of Osteopathic medicine has created their curriculum map.

Entrepreneurship in the US is dying, particularly in rural communities. The prognosis for physician entrepreneurship is guarded.

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.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs