Brett Belock, a 2015 McCloskey winner
Brett Belock’s entrepreneurial journey involves a few twists and turns. He entered the University of Notre Dame in 2004 planning to major in engineering but within 3 days had switched to Industrial Design. Graduating from college in 2008 during the Great Recession required tenacity and another redirection, but he eventually found work designing displays for a large retailer.
Several years later Belock concluded he would need to pursue an MBA in order to reach his professional goals. Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business became his program of choice: “Ask More of Business” — the School’s tagline at the time — inspired Belock with the possibility of business being used as a force for good in the world.
The first time Belock entered the McCloskey Competition, his team didn’t make it through the first round, but by the next year, after gaining some business experience, he tried again and achieved much better results.
After graduation, Belock gained a variety of experiences working in the South Bend area, as a Consultant at enFocus, Product Manager within a regional manufacturer, and eventually as an Innovation Consultant in a regional healthcare system.
“My colleagues and I got to use intrapreneurship to create a brand new innovation department in order to impact people’s lives through focusing on enterprise-wide portfolios. In the healthcare industry, staff are so strapped for time because they are administering to many people in life and death situations. Our job was to pursue digital transformation. This set the enterprise in a new direction, and from this came more digital initiatives and innovation, positively affecting the patient experience.”
Currently, Belock is Product Manager with a health tech startup serving community oncology practices. “I wanted to be further upstream in the chain of understanding customer needs and creating product solutions, instead of only on the buying and implementation side. At AC3 Health I am doing just that.”
“Whether you're going to be an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, the entrepreneurial mindset enables you to do things you never thought you could, and opens up amazing opportunities. My experience in McCloskey taught me so many valuable lessons.