What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation

Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is chaotic, random, and unmanageable. Breakthroughs can be systematically generated using a process modeled on the principles that drive evolution in nature: variance generation, which creates a variety of life-forms; and selection pressure to select those that can best survive in a given environment. Flagship Pioneering, the venture-creation firm behind Moderna Therapeutics, uses such an approach, which it calls emergent discovery. It involves prospecting for ideas in novel spaces; developing speculative conjectures; and relentlessly questioning hypotheses. On November 30, 2020, Moderna Therapeutics announced that Phase III clinical trials for its messenger RNA vaccine demonstrated 95% protective efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that had killed almost 1.5 million people worldwide in the previous 10 months. A relative upstart in the Covid-19 vaccine race and a company that few people had heard of before the pandemic, Moderna looked to be an overnight success. But as its CEO, Stéphane Bancel, has noted, that success was 10 years in the making. Far from a one-and-done stroke of luck, the vaccine was the product of a repeatable process that has been used countless times by the company from which Moderna emerged: Flagship Pioneering, a venture-creation firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose mission is to conceive, make, and commercialize breakthrough innovations in previously unexplored domains of the life sciences. The misconception about the Moderna case, as with many other breakthrough innovations, is understandable. Breakthrough innovations are typically seen as the result of chaotic, random, and unmanageable efforts--the product of pure serendipity or the inspiration of a rare visionary. That view, we believe, is deeply flawed. From our different vantage points (Afeyan has spent the past three decades starting ventures based on breakthrough science and technology, and Pisano has studied innovation processes during the same period), we have come to realize that breakthroughs tend to emerge from a relatively well-defined process modeled on the basic principles that drive evolution in nature: variance generation, which creates a variety of life-forms, and selection pressure to select those that can best survive and reproduce in a given environment. The approach, called emergent discovery, is a structured and disciplined process of intellectual leaps, iterative search and experimentation, and selection.