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            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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