The Innovation System Behind Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine

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."