The Innovation System Behind Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

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

4.3 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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."

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.8	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. At the beginning
0:49.8	of 2020, hardly anyone had heard of the biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts called
0:55.3	Moderna Therapeutics. It was 10 years old and did not have a single commercial product. By the end
1:01.7	of the year, Moderna was selling millions of doses of one of the most effective COVID-19 vaccines
1:08.1	in the world. That commercial product did not come from a eureka moment or a stroke of luck in
1:14.3	the lab. That vaccine, based on cutting-edge messenger RNA technology, was the product of a
1:20.9	repeatable process, one that's been used countless times by the company that founded Moderna, a venture
1:27.1	creation firm called Flagship Pioneering. Here to talk about how to systematically make breakthrough
1:33.8	innovations in unexplored domains is Nubar Afein. He's the co-founder and chair of Moderna, and the
1:41.0	founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. With Harvard Business School Professor Gary Pazano,
1:46.9	Afein wrote the HBR article, What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation. Nubar, it's so great
1:53.5	to have you. Great to be here. You were a biotech entrepreneur even before you founded Flagship
1:59.8	Pioneering. From your experience, what is wrong with how people currently think about breakthrough
2:05.0	innovations? Well, certainly innovation drives the whole startup technology startup world,
2:13.5	and so everybody's after innovation, but over the 20 years or so that I'd been involved in
2:19.8	doing this type of work before Flagship, what I had come to observe is that the kind of innovations
2:27.4	people are working on end up being really focused on the JCCs. The whole notion of the JCC is
2:33.7	something that is a logical extension of what's been done in any number of different directions,
2:40.3	but that something that people can then assess, how likely is it to work, how valuable might it be,
	...

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