Page 194 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

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other labs, and government agencies including the National Insti-
tutes of Health. Foundations and companies currently fund 63%
of the lab’s $17.3 million annual budget; they range from the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation and the Prostate Cancer Foundation to
Novo Nordisk and Hoffmann-La Roche. “A key reason we decided to
work with Bob was his lab’s track record in controlled delivery,” says
Dan Hartman, the director of integrated development and malaria at
the Gates Foundation and the chief liaison between the foundation
and the lab. “Bob and his team’s creativity and technical expertise
cannot be overemphasized.”
A second criterion for project selection is fit with the lab’s core
areas: drug delivery, drug development, tissue engineering, and bio-
materials. “Most of what we do is at the interface of materials, biol-
ogy, and medicine,” Langer says.
Third, he asks whether it’s realistic to believe that the medical
and scientific challenges can be met by applying or expanding exist-
ing science, either at his lab alone or in collaboration with others.
This approach defies a long-prevailing view about the research-
to-product process—that it is linear and looks like this: Basic
research (endeavors aimed at expanding knowledge of nature,
without thought of practical use) leads to applied, or translational,
research (efforts to solve practical problems), which in turn leads to
commercial development (turning discoveries into actual processes
and products)—all culminating in a scale-up to mass production. The
paradigm can be traced to Vannevar Bush, the head of the National
Defense Research Committee and the U.S. Office of Scientific
Research and Development during World War II and a leading pro-
ponent of strong government support for basic scientific research.
Since the war, universities have conducted the lion’s share
of basic research, but corporations have participated too: Think
of AT&T, Corning, DuPont, and IBM, to name just a few. In recent
decades, though, big companies have come to see it as too expensive
and risky: Results are slow and unpredictable, and capturing their
value can be difficult. So they have increasingly turned to academia,
sometimes buying or licensing discoveries or investing in or acquir-
ing start-ups that develop them, other times funding academic
research or having their scientists in academic labs.
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