A Debt of Gratitude
AFTER MONTHS OF CAUTION and isolation, most of us in the United States are heading toward normal—complete with ball games, hugs, and mask-less visits to the office. We owe this shift largely to the creation and rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. Few breakthroughs have affected life as dramatically as what my British colleagues call “the jab.” Although HBR often publishes articles about how companies can get better at innovation, I knew very little about Moderna before its vaccine began racing through clinical trials in 2020. But as Noubar Afeyan (Moderna’s chairman) and Gary Pisano (a professor at Harvard Business School) make clear in their article in this issue, “What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation,” the company spent a decade quietly laying the groundwork for its breakthrough. “Far from a one-and-done stroke of…