Some 70 doctors, researchers, and other health professionals gathered July 21 for the second in the four-part JHU Entrepreneurship Bootcamp series. Presented jointly by the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, Carey Business School, and School of Medicine, the multi-session summer event was coordinated to foster entrepreneurship across the university. The setting adds business methods to the tool box of Johns Hopkins researchers and clinicians, giving subject-matter experts a new familiarity with entrepreneurship and a different lens for viewing their own work.
The first Johns Hopkins-wide business seminar followed a recommendation by President Ronald Daniels, and a survey distributed in April indicated strong interest in a 2014 launch. Among those who signed up for the four full-day courses, which began July 16 and conclude later this month, nearly half are graduate students in some form of biomedical research or practice, approximately two dozen participants are faculty members, and others taking part include postdoctoral fellows, residents, and staff.
Assistant Professor of Medicine Shalini Chandra described the Bootcamp as “an amazing experience” for herself and colleague Suchitra Paranji. The two doctors are co-founders of the start-up Pureffic, and during the Bootcamp they will hear from experts in reimbursement strategy, business model development, sources of funding, intellectual property, and management of core personnel, among other topics.
Phillip Phan, Professor and Executive Vice Dean of the Carey Business School and one of the event’s co-organizers, said that the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp was designed to help inventors accelerate their ideas from concept to first design, with the goal of commercialization in a start-up.
“This year, we are conducting a pilot for the medical campus to prove the curriculum and pedagogy,” Phan says. “If successful, next year we will be rolling it out across Hopkins as a summer start-up academy.”
Phan adds that Daniels, Provost Robert Lieberman, and several Johns Hopkins deans have been highly supportive, and that the interest generated by the event has been equally encouraging and widespread.
“Although Hopkins is late to the start-up game when compared to such institutions as Stanford or MIT, her intellectual capacity and entrepreneurial energy are second to none,” says Phan. “This and other efforts around campus to ignite ‘start-up nation’ at Hopkins are already bearing fruit.”
Lawrence Aronhime, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Entrepreneurship & Management Program at the JHU Center for Leadership Education, is among the event’s organizers. He says the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp shows the changing culture at Hopkins: “For those of us who have been around 15, 20 years, it shows a change in the entrepreneurial climate.”
Aronhime is also an organizer of the Johns Hopkins Business Plan Competition, which marked its 14th year in April by opening the medical technology arena to non-Hopkins teams. This decision was based on the continued improvement in the quality of the entrepreneurial activity at Johns Hopkins. “Now, invariably, the ideas are thoughtful and are focused on real problems, and the Hopkins teams can compete nationally and even internationally,” Aronhime says. “That’s testimony to the changes at Hopkins over the years.”
On August 14, participants will get lessons on reimbursement strategy, based on faculty experience, and primers on business model development and venture capitalization. August 29, the event’s final day, will feature talent attraction and management strategies for start-up businesses, as well as presentations and a poster session for participants to showcase their work.
For more information on the JHU Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, visit http://www.jhubootcamp.com/