Capstone Business Competition Celebrates 20 Years of Transforming Students

The School of Pharmacy’s Capstone Business Plan Competition provides students with hands-on entrepreneurial and leadership skills to start their careers.

At Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS), 178 graduate students are polishing their Capstone Business Plan Competition entries for final presentation and judging. It’s the crowning event of a year-long program that teaches advanced business leadership skills to pharmacy students about to launch their professional careers.

It’s a tense time at the University’s School of Pharmacy in Boston. Danielle Mauro, a doctoral candidate in her sixth year who participated in the competition in 2023, remembers walking into judging day and glancing at her teammates. “Everyone's an absolute wreck, pouring sweat,” said Mauro, who was elected project manager by her team. “I was super nervous. And it was (only) 7 o'clock in the morning.”

Think of the competition as “Shark Tank” meets speed dating, where small teams devise business plans that solve real healthcare needs and distill that work onto a 30-by-42-inch poster board and a minute-long elevator pitch judged by industry professionals and other experts. The winners are announced each April.

As the competition celebrates its 20^th year, its stakes are significant: $2,400 in cash awards will be divided among the top three teams. Additionally, the competition presents students with an opportunity to meet healthcare leaders interested in supporting projects or offering fellowships, and it enhances the school’s recruiting cache.

Past winners who have shined at the Capstone Competition included:

• In 2011, T.J. Parker led the winning team that developed PillPack, an online pharmacy that works with insurers to simplify the user experience around prescription drug delivery. Parker later sold the business to Amazon for $753 million.
• In 2015, contest winner Allison Burns created End Mass Overdose, now called EMO Health. The nonprofit works with the Department of Public Health and treatment providers to improve patient outcomes and offer support in fighting the opioid epidemic.
• In 2016, co-founders Shivani Shah and Simran Bimrah won the competition with AskMolly, a real-time database of illicit substances that provided authoritative drug information for pharmacists, healthcare professionals, and first responders.

But the real payoff is not creating the next healthcare unicorn, said the program’s co-creator and director.

“It's not coming up with the next million- or billion-dollar company, but rather how do I help solve a real problem out there?” said Associate Professor Joe Ferullo, BSP ’96, PharmD ’06, and the Director of Pharmacy Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “How do we teach our students the entrepreneurial and innovation skills they will need to be leaders in their industry?”

In its two decades, the Capstone Business Competition has given some 5,500 students hands-on business skills and career-building experiences, according to the University.

“This entire thing kick-started my personal career,” said Bimrah, project manager on the AskMolly project and who now works for Moderna in marketing. “Joe … really set us up for success. I am a project manager now, right? The role that I played in the Capstone became my exact role in marketing in real life.”

Twenty Years of Success

The program’s origins trace back to the 2003-2004 academic year when Ferullo’s predecessor, Assistant Dean of Assessment and Professional Affairs Joseph Calomo, BS ‘95, PharmD ‘97, initiated a poster competition for the practice management course. Ferullo, hired in January 2004 to oversee the pharmacy practice laboratories and spearhead development of the pharmacy business management pathway, took charge of the fledgling initiative upon Calomo’s departure shortly after that.

Under Ferullo’s leadership, the initial poster project evolved into the comprehensive Capstone program, a revamped curriculum that exists today. The course expansion aligned with an expanded Doctor of Pharmacy degree requirement launched in the United States in 2003, where students must complete a multiyear Doctor of Pharmacy degree to become a licensed pharmacist. As Ferullo saw it, the expanded requirements offered many valuable clinical courses but left a void in developing management, leadership, and innovation skills.

“Students pursuing a rigorous education in modern pharmacy are head-down in books, case studies, and performing clinical rounds,” said Ferullo. “The thought was, how do we take a pharmacy student, someone following a very linear process in their learning, and get them to be more well-rounded? How do we give them more tools in the bag?”

A full Capstone program and competition, Ferullo thought, seemed a powerful way to deliver these skills within a Doctor of Pharmacy curriculum with limited space.

The program challenges students by lifting them out of their comfort zones. As the program starts in September, participants are strangers, randomly assigned to teams of six or seven—a size that makes it awkward to drive consensus without heavy doses of organization and communication. They quickly learn the skills required for working effectively in teams, such as recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of their classmates and assigning roles to them accordingly.

Faculty supplement the project work with instruction in developing a business plan, critical analysis, and product marketing. The emphasis is on learning by doing.

“What employers are looking for now in this industry is, can your students solve problems?” Ferullo said. “Can they think on their feet outside of these pre-populated algorithms? They get that through the project.”

An Edge for Recruiting

The competition helps the school attract top students, said Associate Provost for Pharmacy Education Robert DiCenzo, PharmD, BCPS, FCCP, FAPhA, and Dean of the School of Pharmacy in Boston.

“It differentiates us from the 140 plus other pharmacy programs in the country in that all of our students graduate with experience developing a business plan during which they gain entrepreneurial, communication, collaboration and leadership skills” DiCenzo said. “We hear from the folks hiring our graduates that they need these skills.”

The program has become so crucial to the students’ learning experience that it is now required of all pharmacy doctoral students. “It is integrated into our core curriculum,” DiCenzo said. “[Students] are achieving a lot of the learning outcomes that are important to make them practice-ready before they graduate.”

The Next 20 Years

Capstone Competition entries will continue to reflect the vast changes occurring in the industry. For example, Ferullo expects artificial intelligence to influence pharmacy practice profoundly. “Can we trust AI fully? You could end up killing a patient with the wrong (AI-aided) diagnosis. So, we are looking at using artificial intelligence very strategically in healthcare. I have [competition] teams looking at that, applying that to different models.”

The program’s ability to teach business skills could become even more critical for students to learn, Ferullo said, as life science industries shift full throttle into technologies such as virtual reality, telehealth, and computational modeling. All will produce new business models and generate data to be gathered, analyzed, and acted on by pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.

A Transformational Experience

For student Mauro, a Doctor of Pharmacy ’24 candidate, the Capstone Competition was an exhilarating but challenging journey. She was project manager for the Baby Steps team, which came in second in 2023 with their idea for providing mobile education for women with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome.

She said, the project was transformational in helping her develop leadership skills. “You need to pull out your team's biggest strengths and understand how we all fit together is a puzzle piece,” Mauro said. But another payoff for her was personal as well as professional.

“Just watching my abilities grow. Being able to put my insecurities and doubts to the side and say, ‘I need to do this.’”

2024 Winners

This year’s Capstone Competition took place on April 10, with 28 teams participating. The top-three winners were:

First Place: “ClinMatch,” a website that connects patients with rare diseases to clinical trials through a data matching tool. The team was led by Jessie Hundel, project manager, with Kylie McLaughlin as assistant manager, and members Thao Thi Thanh Pham, Eshaa Patel, Janki Patel, Tucker Romans, and Rebeka Stefa.

Second Place: “GlobalUnity,” a nonprofit vaccination service for refugees and migrants, offering culturally sensitive healthcare in collaboration with local public health departments, providing counseling, screenings, and immunizations. The team was led by Veronia Ibrahim, project manager, with Kiara Rubino as assistant manager, and members Vanessa Araujo, Ammar Janoudi, Siyeon Park, and Maianh Tran

Third Place: “DelStock LLC,” a hospital medication delivery cart integrating verification, delivery, stocking, and returns for seamless medication management. The team was led by Lindsay Klesta, project manager, with Emerson Rafuse as assistant manager, and members Debbie Annang, Sangmi Choi, Gi Eun Han, Jiachen Xue, and Yucheng Yaun

Best Logo: “Katered To You,” Amanda Najm, project manager, Hanna Oh, assistant manager, and team members Chidera Aniagu, Thenicha Bruny, Ha Young Lim, Jieun Sung, and Megan Toner

Outstanding Pharmacy Leadership Award: Joshua Mercure, “Recover-Ease Pharmacy”