By Alison Booth, news correspondent
A new student-led organization on campus aims to bring together students in health sciences, business, and other disciplines to advance healthcare.
Bouvé Innovators, named after the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, is Northeastern’s newest entrepreneurial club and is part of Mosaic, NU’s group of entrepreneur clubs.
Club founder and president Danny Kim said Bouvé Innovators was inspired by both the current healthcare system’s need for entrepreneurs as well as a community need to address innovation in healthcare.
“We were created in order to really help spread those ideas,” said Kim, a third-year pharmacy major. “We want to inspire, connect [and] create the next generation of health scientists and Northeastern really has the potential. We’re here to help you succeed in that endeavor by giving you the substance, giving you the resources you need.”
The club’s board represents members from each college within the university, except the College of Arts, Media and Design, in order to foster diversity.
Encouraging a diversity of majors and interests within the club helps mirror real-world businesses, said Neil Maniar, Northeastern’s director of public health.
“In order to really have something go across that entire spectrum [of being a successful business], there’s so many facets that have to come together,” said Maniar, who encouraged Kim to create the club. “When you have those different disciplines represented in a group like this it also enables students to come together in a way that they might not be able to in a classroom.”
This multidisciplinary approach drew second-year business administration major Fiona Zhao to the new club.
“I’ve always been interested in kind of the social, human aspect of business rather than the finance side,” Zhao said. “So I was looking for a space to explore that interest because there isn’t really much. There’s all the various business clubs and there’s a strictly pharmacy club but it was kind of hard to find both.”
The student organization strives to help its members network with professionals in the industry by hosting speakers with either healthcare or business experience.
“We’re going to connect those interests together and connect the audience from left to right,” Kim said. “You know, who’s actually in the room and why did they end up here and what kind of common interests do we have. So, the idea is that that might be put into a project together or form a great venture.”
To provide the resources for students to explore their ideas, the board is creating an online toolkit that will act as a guideline for students, said board member Garrett Scanlon.
“[The toolkit] outlines a way to be able to communicate your idea and then write a business plan for someone in health science or vice versa; healthcare 101 to someone that has an idea about healthcare but doesn’t really know what the system looks like,” said Scanlon, a fifth-year biology major.
Members of the board are also holding office hours in order to encourage interested students to get in contact with the organization, said board member Jacob Billings.
“Essentially we want to be the middleman,” said Billings, a second-year business major. “We want to be the expeditor in that we’re connecting the student to the industry and creating a mentorship.”
Additionally, Maniar is excited that club members will receive first hand healthcare and business experience that will benefit them in the future.
“This idea of looking at those issues through an entrepreneurial lense is really important and really understanding the challenges that are related to that in a very early point in their career is going to benefit all the individuals that are involved in this throughout their careers,” Maniar said. “I talked to colleagues of mine that are 20, 30, 40 years into their careers and they’re just starting to do this.”
