Teaching Public Health Professionals Entrepreneurship: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is reflected in mass media and pop culture by television shows like Shark Tank and The Profit. In fact, entrepreneurship was characterized as the hype of the 1990s (De Leeuw, 1999) and entrepreneurship education has since been described as booming (Fayolle, 2013). The increase in college degree programs in entrepreneurship has been documented by a range of researchers (Jones et al., 2012; Kuratko, 2005; Wakefield, 2012). Recently, such entrepreneurship programs have begun to extend across campuses and beyond the walls of business schools. Such cross campus programs are currently to be found in curricula in the arts, the sciences, and engineering, as well as in medical schools (Nambisan, 2015). The aim of the present paper is to describe an interdepartmental entrepreneurship curriculum with extra-curricular activities developed at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, for graduate students in public health. Before describing this entrepreneurship curriculum, the changing healthcare landscape is briefly reviewed; the conceptual links between entrepreneurship and the social determinants model of health explored, and entrepreneurship education in the health professions discussed. Shepherd and Patzelt (2015) assert that entrepreneurship scholarship has pushed health topics largely to the periphery. This paper represents an attempt to bring entrepreneurial education among public health professionals closer to the core of healthcare.