Alumni Leadership Brings Platform Innovation to Life

Last semester, Boston University Questrom students collaborated with Defense Operations & Engineering Solutions (DOES) through Questrom’s Center for Action Learning to develop a platform strategy for the ASU Medicines initiative, a healthcare-focused project designed to help prevent shortages of critical medicines.

The collaboration was led by Aaron Sneed (MET’18, Questrom’22), founder and CEO of DOES and a two-time Boston University alumnus. His professional experience gave students the opportunity to test their ideas against the realities of a complex, highly regulated healthcare environment.

The project reflected a model that is increasingly central to the Questrom experience: bringing together students, faculty advisors, and alumni executives to address real organizational challenges through structured, project-based learning.

Questrom’s Action Learning model pairs student teams with industry sponsors to apply classroom frameworks to pressing business questions. Through these engagements, students gain hands-on experience in strategic decision-making while developing the practical skills needed to manage innovation, organizational change, and competing stakeholder needs. For alumni sponsors, the model offers a meaningful way to engage with Questrom students and faculty, explore new ideas, and help prepare the next generation of business leaders.

During the semester, students initially explored potential platform applications across four areas: healthcare, critical infrastructure, ocean data, and energy-efficient computing. Following this exploratory phase, the healthcare initiative—the ASU Medicines Platform—was selected to move forward as the focus of the Action Learning engagement. The ASU Medicines Platform is designed to help prevent shortages of critical medicines by creating a structure for advance commitments supported by standardized quality and evidence requirements. Through their work, Questrom students developed a platform strategy intended to strengthen coordination among stakeholders and support a more reliable supply of essential medicines.

The engagement demonstrates how Action Learning can extend beyond classroom theory, enabling students to contribute to a real-world healthcare challenge while helping an alumni-led organization advance a promising initiative. The work requires them to confront the same tensions that executives face: balancing growth with accountability, innovation with operational constraints, and strategic ambition with evidence.

“In real work, confidence isn’t a vibe. It’s a record,” Sneed said. “We’re asking students to build platforms that can explain themselves under scrutiny, with decision-grade evidence and honest tradeoffs. The goal is simple: build, verify, and tell the truth with data.”

Alumni as catalysts for career readiness

Alumni involvement adds something to project-based learning that cannot be replicated through a textbook or case study alone: proximity to current industry problems and direct exposure to executive decision-making.

By opening their organizations, networks, and expertise to students, alumni sponsors help create environments where students must communicate with stakeholders, work through ambiguity, respond to feedback, and turn analysis into recommendations that someone can actually use.

Those experiences help students build more than technical knowledge. They strengthen professional judgment, collaboration, accountability, executive communication, and the confidence to contribute in unfamiliar settings.

For Sneed, whose firm supports high-reliability and regulated programs through engineering, execution discipline, digital systems, and responsible automation, the partnership is both personal and practical.

“As a two-time BU alum, I’m proud to support students with a real-world proving ground where strategy has to hold up under real constraints,” he said.

That commitment reflects a broader opportunity for Questrom alumni. Whether they sponsor a semester-long project, mentor a team, share data, or serve as a subject-matter advisor, alumni can play a direct role in helping students connect academic learning with the capabilities employers increasingly expect.

Connecting practice with leading platform research

The collaboration also comes as Questrom prepares to host the 2026 Platform Strategy Research Symposium, taking place July 27–28 at Boston University.

The symposium brings together scholars from around the world to advance research on platform strategy, governance, competition, data, artificial intelligence, and digital-market design. The July 28 conference agenda includes research on platform interoperability, algorithmic personalization, healthcare platforms, B2B ecosystems, creator markets, privacy, generative AI, recommendation systems, and platform governance.

Together, the symposium and the DOES collaboration demonstrate the complementary ways Questrom advances platform thinking: through rigorous academic research and through applied projects in which students must translate that thinking into decisions, operating models, and measurable outcomes.

For students, that connection between academic research and practice is critical. It gives them the opportunity not merely to learn how platforms work, but to become alumni professionals capable of designing, evaluating, and leading them.

The DOES engagement also points to a broader lesson about action learning:
Student talent alone does not produce standout work. Questrom students bring sharp analytical training and fresh, unencumbered thinking to complex business challenges, and that combination is well suited to devising creative solutions that seasoned teams, weighed down by institutional habits, might overlook. But the quality of that work depends heavily on what alumni sponsors put into it. Students thrive on feedback, and when that feedback comes from someone who has navigated similar problems professionally, their contributions sharpen quickly, often producing results that rival what experienced consultants or operators would deliver. Sneed’s hands-on approach with Questrom students is a clear example of that dynamic in action, as he describes below.

Q&A: Aaron Sneed on Partnering with Questrom Students

Q: What motivated you to partner with Questrom students on an action learning project?

As a two-time BU alum, I saw this as a meaningful way to give back to a place that helped shape how I think about business, strategy, and leadership. My path started at Morehouse College and continued through BU, and both institutions reinforced the idea that education should prepare people to solve hard, consequential problems. I also believe students deserve real missions, not sanitized classroom exercises. Essential medicines, domestic manufacturing, and drug shortages are not abstract issues. They affect hospitals, patients, public health, national resilience, and the future of U.S. manufacturing. That felt like the right kind of challenge for Questrom students.

Q: Can you describe the business challenges you brought to the student team?

DOES is exploring how to build domestic capability for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients and Essential Medicines, starting with modular manufacturing capacity on Florida’s Space Coast. But the physical manufacturing cell is only part of the challenge. The bigger business question was this, “How do you make domestic essential medicine manufacturing predictable, financeable, and trusted before a shortage happens?” I asked the students to evaluate the problem as a platform strategy challenge. Drug shortages are often treated as a pure supply problem, but the team examined the coordination failure underneath it. Buyers do not always commit early enough. Manufacturers cannot justify capacity without credible demand. Quality and compliance evidence can move too slowly. Financing is difficult because utilization is uncertain. Trust is fragmented across the system.

The team worked on the concept of an Assured Supply Unit, or ASU. The idea is to define a contractible unit of supply that includes the medicine category, formulation, quantity, delivery window, service level, and standardized quality evidence package. In plain English, the goal was to make critical medicine supply something that can be committed, reserved, verified, and trusted. To be clear, this was a strategy and platform design project. It was not clinical guidance, regulatory filing work, or manufacturing instructions. The value was in helping DOES think through the business model, governance, stakeholder incentives, and trust architecture required to make domestic manufacturing more viable.

Q: What surprised you most about working with the students?

What surprised me most was how quickly they moved from “student project” mode to real operating-model thinking. Early on, they were asking good questions. By the middle of the project, they were asking the type of questions I would expect from consultants, operators, or early-stage venture teams. They engaged the problem from multiple angles: pharmacy operations, procurement, finance, compliance, legal, frontline care, platform governance, and manufacturing feasibility. That mattered because this is not a one-function problem. In the real world, the best idea still fails if procurement cannot buy it, quality cannot approve it, finance cannot defend it, and operators cannot use it. They also took feedback well. I pressure-tested them pretty hard at times because that is what the real world does, but they kept tightening the work. No drama, just iteration. That is usually a good sign. It is also cheaper than learning those lessons after launch.

Q: How will the students’ insights influence your organization’s next steps?

Their work gave DOES a useful strategic artifact, not just a classroom deliverable. We can use the final report to sharpen our API and Essential Medicines manufacturing strategy, particularly around how to structure buyer commitments, define the ASU value unit, build the quality and evidence layer, and communicate the platform’s value to health systems, manufacturers, and public-sector partners. One of the biggest takeaways was that DOES should not lead with “we want to build a factory.” That is important, but it is not the full story. The stronger framing is that DOES is working to make critical medicine supply predictable, financeable, and audit-ready. Manufacturing is the muscle. The platform is the nervous system. The students helped clarify that the trust layer is not a side feature. It is part of the product. In regulated markets, available supply is not automatically usable supply. That insight will influence how we think about future pilots, partner outreach, funder conversations, and evidence-package design.

Q: Would you recommend action learning to other alumni? What advice would you give?

Absolutely. I would recommend it to alumni who are working on real strategic problems and are willing to engage with students seriously. My advice is simple: do not bring students a fake problem or a low-priority side project. Bring them something that matters. Give them enough context to be dangerous, clear guardrails so they do not drift, and direct feedback so they can improve quickly. Also, be available. If you treat the project like free labor, you will get a limited outcome. If you treat it like a serious engagement with emerging talent, you may get real strategic value.

Questrom students bring fresh thinking, but they also bring enough professional maturity to handle ambiguity. That combination is valuable. Action Learning gives students a real mission, not just a simulation, and that is where the learning gets powerful. For me, this was a full-circle experience. BU invested in me as a student. This was a chance to invest back into BU students while advancing a mission that matters to DOES: building more resilient, trusted, and scalable systems for critical industries.

Credits

Written by Dee Polat, Director of Alumni Engagement, with AI assistance.

Interview conducted by John Temps, Associate Director of Action Learning.