A core educational component for fostering entrepreneurship culture at the Weldon School is a graduate-level course named Biomedship, which is designed to teach our students what it is like to actually start a technology-based company for biomedical applications. The course does not teach how to write a business plan, nor does it test students how best they can remember different business terms. The course is based on providing experiential learning on how best to talk to potential customers, partners, and competitors as they encounter the chaotic world of startups. We teach students to practice evidence-based entrepreneurship as we test a business hypothesis by getting out of the classroom to see first if people would use the product. Over the course of a semester, each team of student entrepreneurs is asked to interview >100 potential customers! Based on the customer and market feedback, they design and develop a minimum viable product to test the validity of their solution. This course is based on the Lean LaunchPad model of customer discovery and was initially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps(I-Corps) grant (1829146). More recently, Purdue was selected as one of the leaders of NSF Great Lakes I-Corps Hub, a $15M program.

Since 2016, more than 40 graduate students participated in the Biomedship course that led to several early-stage startups including Neurava and OmniVis that have successfully raised funds to continue their development! The entrepreneurship culture around the Midwest region does not get enough credit despite being home to a number of world-class universities that generate an enormous amount of intellectual properties. Purdue BME is leading the charge to encourage entrepreneurship-friendly culture among students and faculty with courses like Biomedship and two recently selected inaugural Purdue Engineering Entrepreneurship Ambassadors.