Course Description and Learning Objectives:
Entrepreneurship in Healthcare and Life Sciences is designed to teach students to weave together the hard science that underlies research-driven enterprises with the commercial, financial, and strategic elements into business plans required for new venture creation.
As the capstone project for the course, students from Booth, the Physical Sciences Division and the Biological Sciences Division will work collaboratively to create business plans and pitch decks based on intellectual property available for license from universities. At the conclusion of the course, their learnings will provide a roadmap for their own entrepreneurial ambitions, and some may have business plans they choose to take forward.
Structurally, in the first three weeks of this course, students will learn and apply business and science frameworks to a challenging life-sciences case. Once the approach is solidified, students will identify intellectual property from universities across the country that they find compelling and then apply the structures they learned to create their own business plans and pitch decks based on the intellectual property they identified. In both the case study and the final project, business, medical and science students will work together in teams to leverage their individual expertise. Many students find this collaboration between business and science to be a highly valuable learning experience. During the course, guest lecturers including entrepreneurs, investors, IP and licensing attorneys will help students construct the roadmap to venture creation.
The specific learning objectives of this course are highlighted below:
? A framework to create and evaluate research programs
? A framework to create and evaluate research-driven business plans
? Business and science students will learn to collaborate across knowledge domains
? How to create and evaluate financial models for entrepreneurial, research-driven businesses
? The fundamentals of intellectual property and licensing
? The creative process and challenges at the earliest stages of research-driven entrepreneurship
? Solid foundation for students to begin their entrepreneurial journeys
Course Procedures
It is not necessary for Booth students to have a background in the sciences or for science students to have a background in business. However, the expectation is that each member is an active participant. Peer assessments make a substantial impact on individual grades. Please be sure you can regularly accommodate team meetings outside the classroom and devote the time necessary, roughly 6-8 hours per week. The course is also highly participatory, so attendance is expected. Please arrive before the class starts.
