Future of Business: Moderna’s Founder on Innovation That Breaks Through

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What are CEOs across industries doing to build resilience and strong cultures in an age of uncertainty? In this Future of Business series, IdeaCast hosts Alison Beard and Adi Ignatius sat down with four leading CEOs to understand where global business is going. In this episode, host Alison Beard speaks with Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Chairman of Moderna. Afeyan shares the organizational models and practices that work best to produce innovation, the difference between managing risk and managing uncertainty, and what separates true breakthrough innovation from everyday, incremental improvements.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Every second counts in sports, and AWS is changing the game.
0:04.5	From the NFL to the NBA and the PGA tour, the world's premier sports leagues are fueling innovation with AWS AI to give fans more of the insights they crave faster.
0:16.9	From predictive analytics to advanced stats, AWS is going beyond the box score.
0:21.8	Learn more at AWS.com slash sports.
0:36.7	I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
0:44.3	Today we're bringing you the third in our series of interviews with CEOs of major companies
0:52.8	that we recorded during our recent
0:54.6	future of business event. Nubara Fan is the founder and CEO of flagship pioneering,
1:00.7	and co-founder and chair of Moderna, the MRNA vaccine company. He thinks deeply about how
1:06.2	man and machine can work together to solve some of the world's largest problems, whether
1:10.4	they're in the
1:10.8	world of science, business, or society. Now, we've spoken to him on Idecast before back in
1:16.4	2021 to talk specifically about leadership and innovation lessons learned in the development of
1:21.3	modernist COVID vaccine. But things move fast in today's business world, and his thinking has evolved
1:26.4	accordingly. He's a trained biochemical engineer, world, and his thinking has evolved accordingly.
1:34.3	He's a trained biochemical engineer, entrepreneur, and executive who has helped spawn more than 100 life science and technology startups.
1:39.5	So he has a unique vantage point as to what really works when it comes to effective innovation. I want to ask first, how do you define breakthrough innovation, not just in science, but across industries?
1:51.0	I think that most innovation focuses on adjacencies and is viewed to be continuous innovation, which means that what you're working on
2:01.8	is an iteration over what's been worked on before.
2:04.8	And once in a while,
2:06.1	you have discontinuous innovation
2:08.4	where it's not easy to connect what's being proposed
	...

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