Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Preparing the next generation of physician leaders to advance the future of healthcare.

Medicine is changing rapidly. New care models, new technologies, evolving payment structures, and shifting patient expectations are reshaping the profession in real time. The physicians who will lead through these changes need more than excellent clinical training. They need the ability to recognize problems clearly, design thoughtful solutions, and bring those solutions into practice at scale.

The Mayo Clinic Innovation Academy was created for this purpose.

The Academy is a graduate medical education program for residents and fellows across Mayo Clinic’s Minnesota, Arizona, and Florida campuses. Its mission is to equip the next generation of physicians with practical fluency in innovation, entrepreneurship, and the business of medicine—the skills required to lead transformation in care delivery, technology, and healthcare administration.

This work is not a departure from Mayo Clinic’s heritage. It is a continuation of it. The Mayo brothers were innovators. The integrated, multispecialty model that defines this institution did not exist before they built it. The Academy carries that tradition forward into the careers of the physicians training here today.

Walk into any clinical environment today and you will find capable clinicians who can list a dozen things that do not work as well as they should. The forms, the workflows, the handoffs, the gaps in care, the technology that was meant to help but added complexity instead. Frustration is widespread—but so are ideas.

What is often missing is the bridge between recognizing what is broken and building what comes next. That bridge is a skill, and it can be taught.

Today’s trainees face extraordinary change. Their careers will unfold within care models that have not yet been designed. They will adopt diagnostic and therapeutic technologies: AI-assisted, decentralized, increasingly personalized. Technologies that did not exist when they entered medical school. They will work with payers, employers, and platforms whose incentives are still taking shape. They will be asked, repeatedly, to do more with less, and to do it better than the generation before them.

A residency program that teaches only clinical medicine prepares physicians for a profession that no longer exists in isolation. The clinical excellence Mayo Clinic is known for must be paired with the ability to design, test, and scale better ways of working. Otherwise, we train exceptional practitioners for a system that will continue to fail the patients they intend to serve.

Innovation education is not an enrichment. It is a core competency for: physicians, for patients, and for the institutions that serve both.