Entrepreneurship in Health Care Industry (SBEN215)

Entrepreneurship in Health Care Industry (SBEN215) - Fall 2024

• Course lecture 3 focused on thinking like an entrepreneur.
• Students were tasked with interviewing an entrepreneur in their area to analyze how personal and professional attributes contribute to success.
• Key questions included: How do entrepreneurs think while running a business? Can I think like an entrepreneur too?
• Common daily problems for entrepreneurs include difficulty getting customers to buy and customers bargaining to pay lower prices for products.
• Problem-solving is a crucial process for entrepreneurs, involving identifying problems and developing solutions.
• Entrepreneurs may face problems related to idea generation, acquiring funding, sourcing materials, manufacturing processes, pricing strategies, marketing and advertising, sales techniques, accounting, establishing a unique market position, and business growth strategies.

Problem-Solving

• Problem-solving is the process of generating solutions to improve a business.
• This process begins with recognizing the problem.
• Identifying the problem allows the development of various solutions.

Thinking Like an Entrepreneur to Solve Problems

• Three key ways: creativity, innovation, and critical thinking.

Creativity

• Identifying innovative ideas not previously considered.
• Creativity does not require artistic skills.
• Entrepreneurs need to believe they can come up with new ideas to solve problems.

Innovation

• Thinking of new ideas and implementing them effectively in real life.
• This builds upon creativity, transforming ideas into functional realities.

Critical Thinking

• Understanding situations and problems by asking pertinent questions (why, what, when, how).
• Researching and exploring different facets of the issue.
• Entrepreneurs must consistently critically think about problems instead of becoming concerned without taking action.

Design Thinking

• An efficient problem-solving approach using a non-linear, iterative process.
• Teams use this process to understand users, challenge assumptions, revise problems, and create solutions that can be prototyped and tested.
• Key steps are empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

Empathize

• Deeply understanding the challenge and the user's needs.
• Considering the user's requirements.
• Solving user problems through research and surveys.
• Recognizing solutions that don't work to prevent repeating failures.

Define

• Accumulating and analyzing user needs and observations.
• Clearly defining the problem to be solved.
• Writing problem statements and defining boundaries.
• Refining statements and considering constraints and criteria.

Ideate

• Using the background from previous phases, venturing beyond established solutions, and looking for new approaches to problems.
• Generating multiple ideas through brainstorming, an open discussion, limitless thinking, clustering ideas, and filtering them down.

Prototype

• Creating prototypes to test different aspects of the solution.
• Designing several prototypes to identify optimal solutions.
• Experimentally creating inexpensive and scaled-down versions of products or features for testing.

Test

• Rigorously evaluating prototype solutions with feedback from users.
• Refine the solution based on testing results.
• Iterate to find or reject alternative solutions. Consider feedback and limited usage situations.

Companies Using Design Thinking

• GE Healthcare, Braun, IBM, and Airbnb.

Case Study: Airbnb

• Airbnb's transformation from a failing startup to a billion-dollar company demonstrates the impact of design thinking.
• In 2009, the company faced near-indefinite losses due to zero revenue growth.

Activity - Identifying and Solving Problems

• Identify problems from family members or friends.
• Generate three innovative ideas to solve each problem.
• Evaluate how the solution can be expanded for broader use and translated into a business opportunity.