Bright Ideas

Defining Entrepreneurship

Mattingly received an AACP New Investigator Award in 2018 for his work on formalizing a definition of a pharmacy entrepreneur; identifying a list of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSAs) needed to be a successful pharmacy entrepreneur; and proposing a set of competencies and taxonomy for pharmacy entrepreneurship. “One of the reasons I was so interested in researching this is because I pursued an MBA while I was in pharmacy school,” he explained. “I noticed that sometimes when we talk about entrepreneurship, it gets saddled with making money and being all about profit. It’s much more than whether you make dollars, it’s, are you creating or adding value that has a broader societal perspective? Maybe it cures a disease or gets people out of poverty. So the entrepreneur construct is much more encompassing.”

Mattingly is working with a panel to identify key concepts of that entrepreneurial construct, such as innovation. “One of the things that comes up quite a bit is being proactive,” he noted. “Being a self-starter and not having to wait on someone else to fix something. If we teach students about this, we’ll have a more proactive cohort of pharmacists who will seek and identify the problems that need to be solved. Can they be creative to solve the problem, can they assess the financial costs and benefits of the solution and can they communicate what they did externally? It may not sound like you’re starting your own business but it’s about being a problem solver and doing it in a way that’s financially sustainable.”

He emphasized that successful pharmacy entrepreneurs must have basic financial knowledge and solid communication skills. “Can you effectively write a proposal and communicate that? How good are you at marketing yourself or being able to sell an idea? How persuasive are you?” Mattingly hopes that having some standards and assessment around entrepreneurship will provide useful guidance. “I want to help shape and outline the specific layers of what it takes to increase our students’ ability to recall, understand, evaluate and create and what that means for entrepreneurship,” he said.

The University of Maryland School of Pharmacy is putting more resources into this on a curricular level, reaching out to alumni who can talk to students about their experiences as pharmacy entrepreneurs. A task force is working on other ways to make entrepreneurism part of the curriculum. Mattingly recommends that colleges of pharmacy that want to promote innovation start by looking at their mission and what they want to achieve. “If you want to improve patients’ health outcomes, apply entrepreneurship through that lens and if that’s the big goal, think about how entrepreneurship fits in with that. Does that align with the overarching mission the school is trying to achieve? Once schools start to implement, it’s important that they spend time up front creating some educational materials for faculty and students to explain what they mean by entrepreneur.” He hopes that a core set of KSAs—to include risk-taking, strategic planning, marketing, competitiveness and social responsibility—will serve as a starting point for making entrepreneurship part of the pharmacy curricula.

A Head for Business

At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) College of Pharmacy, students have been putting their entrepreneurial ideas to the test for several years through the Good Neighbor Pharmacy National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) Pruitt-Schutte Student Business Plan Competition. The goal of this national competition is to motivate student pharmacists to create the blueprint necessary for buying an existing independent community pharmacy or developing a new pharmacy. The UAMS College of Pharmacy has had a team in the competition every year for the past decade and has advanced to the finals five times. Dr. Schwanda Flowers, the college’s interim dean and associate dean for administrative and academic affairs, has been an adviser to student teams since 2008. She and her co-adviser, Dr. Seth Heldenbrand, teach an entrepreneurship and ownership course, which helps teams prepare for the competition.

“We do have the luxury of using our course for students to springboard their ideas into a business plan,” she noted. “We come to class and talk about pharmacy niche development and innovative areas of practice. Teams have to come up with the ideas on their own. We ask them to open a store or purchase an existing store. During the semester they have to come up with a niche idea, do location analysis, develop a marketing plan and present financial feasibility—all within one semester.” Flowers attributes students’ success in the competition partly to the fact that she and her co-adviser devote a lot of time to mentoring students and referring them to a supportive local network; having current owners as mentors is critical.

“We have a strong independent community pharmacy culture here in Arkansas,” she added. “We have a tremendous amount of support from preceptors and pharmacists around the state who will help students with their plan, give them feedback and even let them look at old financials. That helps a lot.” She predicts that entrepreneurship and innovation will drive the future of pharmacy. “As we look at how pharmacists can impact patient care and population health, a lot of those changes are going to occur in independent pharmacies. The pharmacists there can make those decisions about what’s best for the patient and what’s best for the community. A lot of the change we’re going to see will happen in community pharmacy. When you’re the boss, you can make those decisions about how you care for patients.”

Even if student pharmacists do not plan to pursue ownership, Flowers’ and Heldenbrand’s course prepares them to be innovative thinkers regardless of practice setting. “Being able to carve out a space and be entrepreneurial is critical to finding the jobs that are going to be satisfying, where students can use what they’ve learned to improve patient outcomes,” she said. “They’ve got to understand reimbursement issues and the financial aspects along with the clinical aspect of pharmacy.” In addition to providing a leadership series through the curriculum, the college offers several electives that help students hone entrepreneurial skills, such as business planning and understanding market competition. “We walk through understanding community pharmacy financials, writing the business plan, how you market your business, how to present this idea to a financier,” she explained. “Presentation skills are a huge part of our course. Students are not often geared to look at things from a business perspective but more from a clinical perspective.”

Flowers said that UAMS has about 13 percent of graduates each year who plan to own a pharmacy. These graduates often serve as local judges for the business plan competition or mentor current students. UAMS is preparing to offer a weeklong summer academy—the Pharmacy Ownership and Leadership Academy—that would bring students from around the country together to develop ideas to submit to the business plan competition the following year. The hope is that POLA will be endowed soon so the academy would be free for students and they would just cover their travel costs. “One of the things Arkansas can provide is lifelong networking,” she said. “At most pharmacy schools it’s difficult to carve out a place for ownership. That space in the curriculum just keeps getting smaller. I really think most schools would love to have this opportunity for students to explore ownership and pharmacy innovation.”

Testing the Waters

The popular reality show “Shark Tank”—where self-made tycoons assess business and product pitches from entrepreneurs and decide whether to invest—provided inspiration for the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy as faculty pondered how to meet the ACPE requirements around incorporating entrepreneurship into the pharmacy curriculum. Dr. Beth Martin, professor of pharmacy, said she brainstormed with alumni and students to determine how to promote entrepreneurship and build it in beyond the classroom. “In the spring of 2018, we started an entrepreneur club,” Martin said. “We didn’t want it to be an elective and we didn’t want it to be mandated. We needed it to percolate on its own and find its own momentum. It had to be like a seed within you that wants to keep growing. We created a survey for students to understand what they were thinking about. ‘Do you have ideas that could be a service or product that you want to pursue further?’” The co-curricular group met for five 120-minute sessions last spring to compete in the school’s first SHARx Tank.

George Zorich’s book served as the textbook for students, providing examples of entrepreneurial leaders and giving them a springboard to generate their own ideas. Zorich, a Board of Visitors member who also serves on the advisory board for the school’s Division of Pharmacy Professional Development, wants to see more schools executing these types of competitions, which is why 100 percent of the book’s proceeds will go toward developing entrepreneurship programs for pharmacists. “The more people we have doing this, the better off the economy is and the better off healthcare is,” he said.

“There are so many students today who are interested in health sciences but want to marry that with the business world,” Martin agreed. “We’re the first to partner with the School of Business to offer tracks focusing in that area. We’re trying to nurture that growth mindset.” Eight first- and second-year student pharmacists participated in the initial competition, with one team of three, one team of two and three entering as individuals. The first place winner received a $4,000 scholarship and second place received a $1,000 scholarship. Judges included the School of Pharmacy dean; a vice president of a pharmaceutical company; the director of clinical pharmacy services for UW Health; and a Walgreens executive.

Martin and Zorich agreed that the goal behind the competition—which they hope will continue, perhaps with some modifications—was to generate out-of-the-box thinking. “It’s about coming up with a creative solution to a healthcare problem,” Zorich said. “We know healthcare costs are out of control. Could someone come up with an app that the pharmacist could use to help with that? We are overmedicating the elderly…how can pharmacists help those patients? Is there an idea behind that? Is there something the pharmacist could do working with the medical community to decrease the opioid epidemic? We want students taking a chance on coming up with that idea.”

Martin added, “Our younger students are the ones who participated in the competition last year. They are going into different pharmacy settings and their eyes are open. They are not taking anything for granted and they are thinking, could we do that better?” She said that the thread of entrepreneurism runs through some of the skills labs and other courses, particularly in taking innovative approaches to patient care. “It’s about getting students to have a different mindset. How can you be an agent of change and do something more and not just check the box?”

Zorich emphasized that teaching entrepreneurism gives students a more creative mindset. “Pharmacists in general are very conservative. We tend to do things by the book. We want to encourage students to be open to all the things around them. When an idea comes about that could be a solution to a healthcare problem, be vision ready.” He would like to see deans become more engaged on a national level, perhaps partnering with alumni who are entrepreneurs and connecting them with faculty to introduce Shark Tank-style competitions or other methods to expose students to entrepreneurial skills.

Martin was pleased with how well the students did in the first iteration of SHARx Tank. “They surpassed my expectations for the competition and they adapted. It was impressive,” she said. “Entrepreneurship is where our roots are as pharmacists.”

Jane E. Rooney is managing editor of Academic Pharmacy Now.