Entrepreneurship at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy
Under the leadership of our founder Dr. Terry Huang, Firefly Innovations has created two unique action- and innovation-oriented courses, offered through the Department of Health Policy and Management, at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. These courses build on the skillsets that public health education provides to students in tackling entrenched public health challenges today. The courses are ideal not only for students who want to create and launch their own startups but also those who want to be social and policy entrepreneurs in their communities or workplaces. The methods for innovation and problem-solving that are taught in these courses can be applied to a wide range of problems and settings.
These courses are open to those who are not in a public health degree program. Students from other CUNY programs are welcome. If you are not currently a CUNY student and wish to enroll as a nondegree student, please click here to consult the application process..
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Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving process of discovery, ideation, and experimentation that employs various design-based techniques to gain insight and yield innovative solutions for challenges. It has been widely used by designers, engineers, and businesses, among others, to solve complex challenges. Increasingly, it is also now being applied in public health and healthcare. At the heart of this approach is a deep sensitivity to the needs of people and communities. In this course, we will explore each step of the design thinking process and become familiar with the design thinker's mindset and toolkit. Students develop skills as ethnographers, visual thinkers, strategists, service designers, and storytellers through a series of online modules, discussions and hands-on experiences.
Throughout the course, students will apply what they have learned to a public health issue that they are passionate about, by untangling the complexities of related policy and exploring innovative ways to create real impact. This course is an intensive course over 3 weeks (15 days) each January.
The course runs asynchronously online with 2-3 live sessions. It is highly recommended that students take this course prior to taking Public Health Entrepreneurship.
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Public health entrepreneurship can be defined as a continuous mission- and innovation-driven process to create new ways of tackling public health challenges and to produce lasting social or systems change.
The Public Health Entrepreneurship course at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy is a hands-on studio course that seeks to expand the students’ toolbox to incorporate entrepreneurial methods to innovate public health solutions. The course trains students to discover and define a true pain point in the community, and ideate, prototype and test potential solutions in an iterative manner until a good product-market fit is established. Since sustaining or scaling a public health requires the generation of resources, the course also provides students with the foundational knowledge in business modeling so that their designed solution can achieve financial viability and create population-wide impact.
The course incorporates not only insights from the lead instructor but also industry experts in the startup world. Students work in small teams to develop a public health venture throughout the semester and present their startup in a venture pitch competition at the end of the course. This course is currently offered synchronously online in the Spring semester each year
PUBLIC HEALTH ENTREPRENEURSHIP SPEAKER SERIES
The course includes a speaker series featuring incredible entrepreneurs who have successfully launched and scaled public health ventures and experts who advise the world’s top innovators. The Public Health Entrepreneurship Speaker Series is open to the public and hosted on Zoom by the Center for Advanced Technology & Communication in Health, the Center for Systems & Community Design, the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center, and FireFly Innovations at CUNY Graduate School for Public Health & Health Policy.
