Page 192 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

PROKESCH

of project funding a plus, and a leadership style that balances free-
dom and support.
The United States alone spends roughly $500 billion a year on
research, but “much of that is mundane,” says H. Kent Bowen, an
emeritus professor at Harvard Business School who has spent years
studying academic and corporate labs. “If there were more highly
collaborative, Langer-like labs that focused on high-impact research,
the United States would realize its enormous potential for creating
wealth.”
Langer’s achievements are remarkable on several counts. His
h-index score, a measure of the number of a scholar’s published
papers and how often they have been cited, is 230—the highest of
any engineer ever. His more than 1,100 current and pending patents
have been licensed or sublicensed to some 300 pharmaceutical,
chemical, biotechnology, and medical device companies, earning
him the nickname “the Edison of medicine.” Alone or in collabora-
tion, his lab has given rise to 40 companies, all but one of which are
still in existence, either as independent entities or as part of acquir-
ing companies. Collectively, they have an estimated market value of
more than $23 billion—excluding Living Proof, a hair products com-
pany that Unilever is acquiring for an undisclosed sum.
A final “product” of the lab is people: Scores of the roughly 900
researchers who have earned graduate degrees or worked as post-
docs at the lab have gone on to distinguished careers in academia,
business, and venture capital. Fourteen have been inducted into the
National Academy of Engineering, 12 into the National Academy of
Medicine.
The multidisciplinary approach is still a work in progress in aca-
demia, but it has been gathering steam there over the past decade
or so, reflecting universities’ growing interest in tackling real-world
problems and spawning new businesses and a recognition that doing
so often takes diverse expertise. Although it has long been common
in the business world, companies too could improve their results by
applying elements of Langer’s research-to-product process, thereby
creating brand-new offerings and refreshing or reinventing their
businesses again and again.

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