‘Shark Tank’ format encourages innovation among KGI pharmacy students

CLAREMONT, Calif. — The popularity of ABC’s Shark Tank — in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to celebrity investors — is now seeing educators incorporate the show’s format into learning experiences. Such is the case at the Keck Graduate Institute School of Pharmacy, where students participated in a Shark Tank-esque competition to pitch new ideas for pharmacy technology as part of the school’s pharcy informatics course. 

 

Students in 11 teams developed app ideas throughout the course and then presented the ideas in a 5-minute presentation to a five-person juding panel that included serial entrepreneurs, digital health experts and the program director of IBM Watson Health, Leonard Lee. 

 

“Technology is changing so rapidly. We can introduce the current commercially available applications, but by the time our students graduate and start practicing, the technology landscape might look quite different,” the course instructor and the school’s assistant dean and chair of clinical and administrative sciences, Armen Simonian, said. “I wanted to challenge the students to recognize and address the issues that modern pharmacy is facing and see if they could come up with informatics solutions to help address those issues.”

 

For students, the assignment presented a welcome challenge by forcing them to think about how to address issues in pharmacy with potential solutions. 

 

“This (competition) was a phenomenal opportunity for us to employ our creativity, work as a team, and be entrepreneurial,” said student Ariana Ayón Verduzco, whose group created an app called inSUREassist that made patients’ third-party benefits more accessible. “The classes leading up to the event were like a think tank where we exchanged ideas, offered feedback, and encouraged one another's creativity.”

 

Three teams ended up in first, second and third place after presenting to the judges, who used a rubric to assess the ideas.

 

“We mentally stretched our students to employ recently learned management and informatics concepts and develop realistic business plans for developing and marketing their new applications,” Simonian said. “We created a real-world situation that translated into a meaningful and interesting learning experience.“