Entrepreneurial Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences is designed to be an entry point for graduate school students in business, medicine and science who are interested in careers in life-science entrepreneurship. The course is designed to teach students to weave together the hard science that underlies the foundational technology of life science enterprises with commercial, financial, and operational tools required for business leadership. The specific objectives of this course are to:
- Provide business students with a framework through which scientific and technical enterprises can be evaluated, and upon which a strategy can be constructed. Additionally, business students will extend their knowledge of the fundamentals of life sciences research and gain comfort in the “language” of science.
- Provide science and medical students with a business framework that is designed to be layered upon the scientific method. Science students will also extend their knowledge of the structural elements behind a research methodology, a learning many have found to be quite useful.
- Teach business and science students the arc between science and business in the evaluation of scientifically based entrepreneurial enterprises.
- Teach business and science students the skills necessary for collaboration between business and science leaders.
Course Description
In the first four weeks of the course, students will learn a business framework, a research framework and develop the expertise necessary to understand the arc between them. During this period, they will apply these learnings in teams of five to an instructor-developed case, Guardant Health. In Week 5, students will then form new 5 student teams, each team selecting one late-stage entrepreneurial company of collective interest to use as a substrate for learning throughout the remainder of the quarter. The teams will evaluate and analyze the company’s science and technology, market opportunity, competition, product-market fit, financial statements, projections, and leadership using the frameworks from the first 4 weeks. Through a holistic understanding of a successful life-science company each team will develop deep domain expertise in one specific field, mimicking the entrepreneurial experience.
The course is not designed to build student ventures, which would take investigation beyond this learning environment. Instead, it prepares students for future entrepreneurial opportunities, building skills to assess and understand the development of life-science endeavors. At the end of this course, the lessons will provide a roadmap for students’ own entrepreneurial ambitions.
