JHU Carey Professor Wins Award for Innovative Teaching
Toby Gordon, an associate professor at the John Hopkins Carey Business School, has recently received an award for innovation in teaching.
On October 22, she received $1,000 from the Middle Atlantic Association of Colleges of Business Administration for her role managing Carey’s Discovery to Market technology transfer course.
In the innovative course, students conducted studies to determine the feasibility of discoveries and inventions as viable commercial products. Students consider several factors as they evaluate ideas: whether similar products exist, how they’ve fared, whether the product would conflict with existing patents, what sales and revenue the product might generate in 5 and 10 years, whether inventors should set up their own company or licence the idea to another company better able to perform manufacturing and marketing.
If students decide the products are marketable, they recommend a business plan.
Eleven of last year’s twelve projects involved medical inventions–indicating the strength of medical-sector business initiatives, which has led to a national trend of increasing interest in medical MBAs.
As Gordon reported in a recent JHU press release, the purpose of the course is to help students “learn the crucial scientific and legal aspects associated with projects like these, in order for them to then go and work on the business aspects.”
One recent Global MBA student, Gabriel Plumer, reports that it worked. “In my area at Merck,” he said, referring to the pharmaceutical giant where he took a job in an innovation venture unit just after graduation, “we get to evaluate new types of opportunities for commercialization, and the process we use is very similar to the process used in D2M. This course provides a really unique experience for students here. It’s the type of real-world experience you get when you come to the Carey Business School.”
