Entrepreneurial training in public health postgraduate programs: a systematic review of educational approaches

The public health sector is undergoing sustained change, shaped by complex health challenges, constrained resources, and evolving employment conditions that may affect the availability of stable and fulfilling career pathways for public health professionals. Within this context, the integration of entrepreneurial competencies into public health training has been proposed as one potential strategy to support innovation, workforce adaptability, and career diversification. This systematic review examined the reported landscape of entrepreneurial training within postgraduate public health programs and described the educational approaches through which such training is delivered. A comprehensive literature search was conducted across eight databases (PubMed, Scopus, ProQuest Central, Cochrane, EBSCO Medline Ultimate, Google Scholar, PsycINFO, and Semantic Scholar) for studies published between 2000 and May 2025. A complementary targeted scan of publicly available Master of Public Health (MPH) and related programs (13-15 August 2025) identified universities explicitly referencing entrepreneurship-related training. Three peer‑reviewed studies met the inclusion criteria, indicating a small and heterogeneous body of empirical work on public health entrepreneurship (PHE) education at the postgraduate level. Across included studies, PHE was inconsistently defined and most often positioned as an elective rather than a core curriculum component. Educational approaches primarily used experiential, team‑based, and mentor‑supported formats and addressed a broad, but not consistently specified, set of competencies, including innovation and opportunity recognition, networking, communication and stakeholder engagement, management and leadership, and basic legal, marketing, and financial knowledge. Outcomes were largely limited to short‑term, self‑reported perceptions, with little evidence on long‑term skill acquisition, career pathways, or workforce‑level effects. Reported constraints included limited faculty expertise and mentorship capacity, restricted institutional resources, and uneven access to entrepreneurship‑supportive ecosystems. Current evidence suggests that postgraduate PHE training is emerging but remains sparsely documented and weakly evaluated. Further research is needed to develop shared competency frameworks, apply more rigorous and longitudinal evaluation designs, and investigate scalable delivery models, including digital and AI‑enabled approaches, with particular attention to equity in access to entrepreneurship training within public health education.