Michelle Gallaher CEO, Opyl

Global Executive MBA, Monash University Business School, 2019

“I learned the critical difference between incremental innovation and genuine disruption. I’ve worked in the pharmaceutical, biotech and medtech sectors for 25 years and we always talk about innovation, but healthcare is a conservative space. The MBA gave me a new way of thinking and very clear, functional business models to develop products and services in the digital economy in health. At one point I was listening to a lecturer and I just started rewriting my business plan, because it made perfect sense.

Before the MBA, I wouldn’t have had the courage, the tools or frameworks to structure my thinking to design a business solution. I’d been talking about unaffordable healthcare, clinical trials and data publicly for years – I just didn’t know how to solve things. I wasn’t able to marry it all until

I had the intellectual freedom to explore it in a really safe place, with the input of the alumni around me who egged me on. I deliberately chose an MBA on digital transformation and life sciences

– it was very applied and it was in a global context, which I needed to make it work. Distance is no disadvantage in the digital economy.”