As innovation and entrepreneurship continue to transform healthcare, medical institutions are increasingly incorporating business skills and knowledge into their curricula. The goal of this study was to understand the types of students that engage in these curricula by assessing the entrepreneurial characteristics of students participating in a business and healthcare innovation summit.
As suggested by the total number of attendees at the event (123 people), passive interest in medical-entrepreneurship likely exists amongst students, faculty, and other members of the healthcare industry. Almost 50% of these attendees were undergraduate, graduate, or medical students; data that underscores the increasing interest in entrepreneurship in these populations which has been well-documented in previous studies (Wanke et al. 2015).
Given that these students were participating in a voluntary, supplemental entrepreneurial curriculum event, we hypothesized that the sampled population would exhibit significantly positive mean responses for all four measured entrepreneurial characteristics. However, this was not the case. Rather, while respondents reported significantly positive attitudes towards a future entrepreneurial career (e.g. Interest) and perceived positive support from their community and peers for entrepreneurial pursuits (e.g. Support), they were neutral regarding both their Confidence in their entrepreneurial abilities and Intention to pursue an entrepreneurial venture (Figure 1).
It is important to acknowledge the significant, positive relationship between entrepreneurial Interest with each of the other characteristics (Figure 2). This suggests that - as one would expect - overall excitement towards entrepreneurship is critical to a student’s confidence, perceived support, and intention towards an entrepreneurial pursuit. Conversely, the lack of significant correlations between Support and Intention or Support and Confidence suggests that peer and faculty support alone is not sufficient to engage these students in entrepreneurial pursuits. Rather, our results suggest there’s likely a complex interplay between an individual’s various entrepreneurial characteristics. Taken together, these data imply that multi-faceted curricula targeting multiple domains of entrepreneurship (such as Innovation Summit-type events) may be the most effective means of fostering innovative pursuits in these populations.
The results of this study provide foundational data for institutions and medical educators advocating for grant funding for supplemental medical-entrepreneurship curricula. The significantly positive Interest and Support in this sample (Figure 1) suggests that there is indeed a strong community of students who are actively interested in learning more about healthcare innovation (e.g. the attendee ‘Demand’ for these events is substantial). These results combined with the neutral Confidence and Intention data suggest that there are actionable opportunities for administrators, policy makers, and educators to fulfill this demand and foster innovation. For example, the significantly positive correlation between Confidence and Intent (Figure 2) suggests that curricula designed to improve entrepreneurial confidence through skills workshops and seminars may, in-turn, increase student intent in pursuing innovative healthcare ventures. Furthermore, grant support for worthy educational experiences can encourage students to actively seek out additional experiences, courses, and self-directed learning in fields that drive their individual entrepreneurial curiosity and interest. Additionally, institutional support through scholarships and establishment of physical space for laboratories, incubators, and accelerators can aid in removal of financial barriers and promote a culture of innovation. Moreover, public and private academic institutional support for these Innovation Summit-type events provides a venue for participants to build their skills sets, test their innovative ideas, and network within a like-minded community.
A secondary goal of this work was to provide baseline metrics for future studies investigating trends of entrepreneurial characteristics in similar populations over time. As such, it is important to consider whether the metrics measured here sufficiently captured the entrepreneurial profile of the sampled population, or whether future studies should investigate additional metrics. The results of Figure 3 show that combined, all the variables measured in this study result in linear models of Intention and Confidence with adjusted R squared values of 0.66 and 0.55, respectively. While these values are a marked improvement in captured variability compared to the simple pairwise linear regression models of Figure 2, they are still relatively low. One explanation is that this is because a simple linear model is not the best fit for the system at hand, which would warrant additional, more sophisticated analyses of larger data sets.
Alternatively, these results may suggest there are additional characteristics that were not accounted for in this study. As such, we would suggest that future studies include more detailed and segmented entrepreneurial metrics, perhaps by adding additional specific questions regarding each characteristic (for example: subcategories of confidence regarding different genres of entrepreneurial skills, such as securing funding, building a team, finding mentors, etc.).
The results of this work set a foundation for numerous additional studies. In particular, it would be worthwhile to capture direct measurements of the utility of Innovation Summit-type curricula by investigating how they affect entrepreneurial characteristics of participants. Such a study could be accomplished with a pre-and-post event survey using similar data collection methods to those in this study and would likely provide valuable information regarding how to best improve and tailor these events in the future. Similarly, an in-depth comparison between different types of entrepreneurial-medicine curricula (e.g. Innovation Summits, vs. Classroom Lectures, vs. other teaching modalities) would help to inform medical educators about the most effective curriculum structures as well as provide more appropriate and actionable analysis of this unique entrepreneurial population. Additionally, continued demographic assessments at these events may help inform how well they are being marketed to - and connecting with - different student groups. Furthermore, studies investigating trends in entrepreneurial characteristics of a cohort of students who participate in multiple curricular events over time would likely produce useful and informative data about the role these events play in fostering entrepreneurial features.
Limitations
This study is subject to potential limitations. Small sample size may have led to type II error, resulting in an inability to parse results by demographics or education level (e.g. graduate, medical, undergraduate) as well as an inability to look for significant difference in entrepreneurial characteristics between groups. Also, the largest subset of the sampled population was medical students. Despite the seemingly apparent increase in entrepreneurship amongst graduate, medical, and undergraduate healthcare students alike, medical students are less likely to have a primary and immediate goal of starting a company given the prospect of residency training after graduation. This may have biased responses to questions such as “My professional goal is to become an entrepreneur,” and lowered the mean Intention category score (Appendix 2).
Related to this, an additional limitation is the choice of instrument used in this study, which was developed and validated in a class of secondary students without a healthcare focus. The Biomedical Entrepreneurship Network provides a monthly speaker series and workshops that focus on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, covering core business concepts such as accounting, finance, economics, etc. Although these lessons are delivered in the context of healthcare entrepreneurship, they are not dependent upon this context. Similarly, this instrument was utilized, because it was validated to broadly assess entrepreneurial characteristics in students. However, since the respondent pool was ultimately comprised almost entirely of medical students, this may have been a missed opportunity to modify this instrument or develop a novel instrument to better assess these characteristics in this unique population.
In addition, results from this study may be difficult to generalize more broadly to students in different regions or in different, non-healthcare educational trajectories since respondents were exclusively registrants of a single Innovation Summit, which took place at a medical institution in New Jersey, United States. Furthermore, sampling bias must be considered given that eager entrepreneurs who registered for the event may have been more likely to participate in the study due to their overall passion for the subject.
While the sample population in this study was relatively small, it is important to note that the reported demographics were considerably skewed towards early-to-mid twenties, Caucasian, males. Greater diversity of backgrounds and ideas is critical for maximal innovation in healthcare. Thus, observing similar trends in future studies would warrant additional research investigating the cause of these skewed demographics. Further demographic studies showing similar skews in age, race, and gender would warrant advocacy for additional funding and support of initiatives that encourage entrepreneurial interest across diverse student populations.