7 November 2020 (Saturday) – In an effort to cultivate social entrepreneurship among students, IMU Community Engagement, together with Hult Prize IMU 2020, hosted an online sharing session “Entrepreneurship In Healthcare” as part 3 of the Digital Speaker Series by Hult Prize IMU 2020. The session is presented by IMU Alumnus Dr Raymond Choy (MBChB), co-founder and CEO of the tele-healthcare service provider, Doc2Us. Dubbed as “The Nobel Prize for students”, the Hult Prize Program is a global platform for college and university students to drive social change through education and entrepreneurship. Students participate in teams to pitch their ideas to solve social challenges based on the theme of the year. The winning teams will head on to the regional, followed by the global summit to compete for $1,000,000 US dollars as seed capital for their startup. The hour-long session has over 100 attendees representing different institutes of higher learning from various parts of the country. The campus director for Hult Prize IMU 2020, Chiah Ruey Chee, gave a short welcoming speech before Prof Khoo Suan Phaik, Dean for University Community Engagement IMU gave a short introduction of the role of IMU Community Engagement in helping students and staff develop essential skills through community-engaged activities. Next, Dr Raymond began his presentation by recounting his experience with social entrepreneurship as a healthcare provider his journey on how he co-founded Doc2Us. He also talked about challenges faced by the healthcare industry which are areas of opportunities for social innovation through startup enterprises.
| The key points of his presentation can be boiled down into 3 segments: |
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| 1. Roles of entrepreneurship in healthcare |
| 2. Understand how to improve the healthcare system through social entrepreneurship |
| 3. Learn and develop a student-led social venture |
After his presentation, there was a short Q&A session with questions from participants on social entrepreneurship.
| Some of Dr Raymond Choy’s many tips for budding social entrepreneurs who want to make a change: | |
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| From Ideas to Action | It is very good to start from the ideation phase of dreams in a startup. But ideas will remain ideas if it is not executed. No matter how innovative the ideas one may have in mind, surely there are many others who would have similar ideas as well. The difference is in who are the ones who will execute the idea. |
| Feedback and Mentorship is Gold | When venturing into social entrepreneurship, you may end up in situations where you do not know where to go and waste precious time. Having an experienced mentor to guide you and validify your ideas will save you time. An incubator is a good place to start looking for mentorship and idea refinement. Alternatively, you can pitch your ideas to your friends and family as they are also a good source of feedback. |
| Speed and Agility is Key | Do not be stuck in building the perfect solution because speed is the currency in today’s world. Where bigger companies are slower in churning out new ideas due to red tapes, startups are more agile and can move forward with new innovative ideas in a shorter time. Therefore, build a prototype solution that is good enough, test it with the market, collect feedback and improve on it to make a better solution. Prepare to fail, embrace your failure and move on to find another way. |
| Buiding a Solid Team | The backbone of a good startup is working with the right partners. Your founding team should have people with skillsets that complement each other, believes in your ideas and are people that you are comfortable working with. When your value systems are aligned, your business can survive through many obstacles. |
Dr Raymond’s passion in providing the best healthcare service to all is evident in his inspiring sharing. He hopes that the younger generation of healthcare providers could use social entrepreneurship to facilitate greater changes in the healthcare industry for the betterment of society. The session was recorded and has been posted on the IMU Cares Facebook page for general public viewing. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=110105324162102
