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 required to construct business plans. As the capstone project for the course, graduate 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 or other enterprises.
Core learnings include: 1) evaluation of research endeavors, 2) construction of research plans; 3) the arc between the construct of science and business plans; 4) the construction of business plans for new enterprise formation in technically-driven enterprises; 5) the basics of how to construct of financial models for new enterprises. At the conclusion of the course, their learnings will provide a roadmap for students' 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. 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 mid-term project 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 whose lectures are designed to 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.
