Page 193 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

THE EDISON OF MEDICINE

Idea in Brief

The Problem a better place and make lots of
money.
Early-stage research is expensive,
risky, and unpredictable—so cor- The Model
porations shy away from it, leaving
many opportunities unexplored. MIT’s Bob Langer has a proven
The Solution formula for accelerating the pace
of discoveries and getting them
By pursuing research aimed at into the world as products—and
solving society’s major problems, it’s one that any organization can
companies can make the world draw on.

Focus on High-Impact Problems

One of Langer’s mantras when choosing projects is: Consider the
potential impact on society, not the money. The idea is that if you
create something that makes a major difference, the customers and
the money will come. It’s a profound departure from the approach of
many big companies: If an idea for a product is so radically new that
discounted cash flow can’t be calculated, they often won’t pursue
it, or they give up when the research hits an obstacle—as ambitious
research almost always does.
To Langer, “impact” means the number of people an invention
could help. The life sciences enterprises that have emerged from his
lab have the potential to touch nearly 4.7 billion lives, according to
Polaris Partners, a venture capital firm that has financed many of
them. For example, one of the lab’s products, on the market since
1996, is a wafer that can be implanted in the brain to deliver che-
motherapy directly to the site of a glioblastoma. Another, recently
handed over to a new company—Sigilon, based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts—is a potential cure for type 1 diabetes, developed in
concert with researchers at other universities: Encasing beta cells in
a polymer, the researchers have shown, can protect them from the
body’s immune system yet allow them to detect the level of sugar in
the blood and release the appropriate amounts of insulin.
With such concrete, ambitious projects on the lab’s docket, the
customers have indeed come: foundations, companies, scientists in

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