Teaching Scientists Entrepreneurship: A Dialectical Approach

Today, we know relatively well about what should be taught in the entrepreneurship program for non-business majors. However, our understanding ofhowshould the non-business students be taught is still limited. To address this issue, we study the entrepreneurship curriculum developed for students in the Nontraditional Doctor of Pharmacy (NTPD) program at the University of Maryland Baltimore. In principle, the core of this entrepreneurship curriculum resembles a typical business school entrepreneurship course with an emphasis on developing a business or a project plan at the end of a two-semester, six-credit course sequence. This entrepreneurship curriculum for PharmD has a successful track record. From 1995 to 2003; 35% to 40% of the business plans developed by the NTPD students have been successfully funded. Although the program is structured in a similar manner as many other short-term entrepreneurship curricula in non-business programs, its implementation and dialectic approach create a dynamic learning environment that has effectively assisted non-business major graduate students to engage in business venturing activities. The infusion of dialectical inquiry at the NTPD program enables clinical pharmacy students to exploit their professional expertise while developing competence in business planning. Students are expected to plan for the implementation of some new aspect of clinical pharmacy into a new or existing practice. In this research, we reported the design of NTPD entrepreneurship curriculum and the training of business planning. Given the lack of foundation business knowledge and course time limitation in NTPD (and other hybrid programs), we posit that the effective implementation of dialectical inquiry will help students improve the quality of new venture planning.