Page 191 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

IANSITI AND LAKHANI

The Edison of Medicine

by Steven Prokesch

O

ONE MORNING LAST YEAR, James Dahlman came to Bob Langer’s office
at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research to say good-
bye. He was meeting with Langer and Dan Anderson—his doctoral
advisers. The 29-year-old was about to take up his first faculty posi-
tion, in the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech, and
he wanted their advice.
“Do something that’s big,” Langer told him. “Do something that
really can change the world rather than something incremental.”
These were not just inspirational words for a former student.
They are the watchcry that has guided Langer, a chemical engineer
and a pioneer in the fields of controlled-release drug delivery and
tissue engineering, throughout his four-decade career at MIT. And
they are part of the formula that has made Langer Lab one of the
most productive research facilities in the world.
Academic, corporate, and government labs—indeed, anyone lead-
ing a group of highly talented people from disparate fields—could
learn much from Langer’s model. He has a five-pronged approach
to accelerating the pace of discoveries and ensuring that they make
it out of academia and into the real world as products. It includes
a focus on high-impact ideas, a process for crossing the proverbial
“valley of death” between research and commercial development,
methods for facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration, ways to
make the constant turnover of researchers and the limited duration

171