People eat an estimated 100 billion bananas every year, making them one of the most consumed fruits on the planet. It's hard to imagine a world without bananas – yet the possibility exists. The future banana supply at your nearest supermarket is under siege by fungal diseases. Black Sigatoka is one of the most destructive diseases to commonly grown banana cultivars. Like so many pathogens, it has developed resistance to current fungicides.

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.

At a Fintech conference in New York put on by Fordham University in the spring of 2017, an AI expert made a bold prediction: Someday there would be a company with a market cap of one trillion dollars. He predicted that this valuation, which at the time seemed incredible, would be based on that firm's extensive use of AI. He was correct in at least one regard: Apple became the world's first trillion-dollar company a little over a year later. Was Apple's staggering valuation due to the power of AI? Are AI and, more broadly, data analytics, the key drivers of business growth? Apple uses data analytics and AI extensively.