evidence: The Innovation System Behind Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine [...] Noubar Afeyan, cofounder and chair of Moderna Therapeutics and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, says that the breakthrough innovation behind the company’s Covid-19 vaccine came not as a stroke of luck, but from a repeatable process. He outlines a system called "emergent discovery" that involves working back from future ideals, pioneering in novel spaces, encouraging unreasonable ideas, and persistently questioning hypotheses. And he says this process applies to other industries besides life sciences. Afeyan is the coauthor, with HBS professor Gary Pisano, of the HBR article "What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation." [...] By the end of the year, Moderna was selling millions and millions of doses of one of the most effective Covid-19 vaccines in the world. That commercial product not come from a eureka moment or a stroke of luck in the lab. That vaccine based on cutting-edge messenger-RNA technology was the product of a repeatable process. It’s been used countless times by the company that founded Moderna: a venture creation firm called Flagship Pioneering.