Curriculum content for innovation and entrepreneurship education in US pharmacy programs

Abstract

For many decades, the healthcare sector has been playing catchup with other industries in terms of innovation, primarily due to the low number of healthcare professionals with innovation and entrepreneurship skills in the workplace. The lack of innovation skills, particularly among pharmacists, may result from the fact that innovation and entrepreneurship training is not an integral part of most pharmacy core curricula. In fact, a limited number of pharmacy schools offer innovation and entrepreneurship courses either as part of a joint MBA/PharmD degree or as a certificate. These programs differ greatly from each other in their curricular content, although their overall goals are to teach future pharmacists the skills required to manage service delivery, oversee budgets, improve efficiency, control costs and continuously achieve quality improvement. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to assess commonalities and differences in curricular content between entrepreneurship and innovation training programs in the USA and, second, to present a set of must-haves for innovation and entrepreneurship curricular content for core curricula in pharmacy.