The Innovation System Behind Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine
HBR IdeaCast
English - September 23, 2021 14:00 - 21 minutes - 22.2 MB - ★★★★ - 1.6K ratingsCareers Business News Business News strategy innovation leadership entrepreneurship management economics finance communication teams hbr Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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Noubar Afeyan, cofounder and chair of Moderna Therapeutics and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, says that the breakthrough innovation behind the company’s Covid-19 vaccine came not as a stroke of luck, but from a repeatable process. He outlines a system called “emergent discovery” that involves working back from future ideals, pioneering in novel spaces, encouraging unreasonable ideas, and persistently questioning hypotheses. And he says this process applies to other industries besides life sciences. Afeyan is the coauthor, with HBS professor Gary Pisano, of the HBR article "What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation."