HBR senior editor Prokesch reports in depth on Langer Lab’s proven formula for accelerating the pace of discoveries and getting them into the world as products. It includes:

Early-stage research is expensive, risky, and unpredictable—so corporations generally shy away from it, leaving many opportunities unexplored. They could revitalize their research operations by adopting the approach taken by Bob Langer, a chemical engineer whose lab at MIT is one of the most productive and profitable research facilities in the world.

In Brief The Problem Early-stage research is expensive, risky, and unpredictable—so corporations shy away from it, leaving many opportunities unexplored. The Solution By pursuing research aimed at solving society’s major problems, companies can make the world a better place and make lots of money. The Model MIT’s Bob Langer has a proven formula for accelerating the pace of discoveries and getting them into the world as products—and it’s one that any organization can draw on.

One morning last year, James Dahlman came to Bob Langer’s office at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research to say good-bye. He was meeting with Langer and Dan Anderson—his doctoral advisers. The 29-year-old was about to take up his first faculty position, in the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech, and he wanted their advice.

“Do something that’s big,” Langer told him. “Do something that really can change the world rather than something incremental.”

These were not just inspirational words for a former student. They are the watchcry that has guided Langer, a chemical engineer and a pioneer in the fields of controlled-release drug delivery and tissue engineering, throughout his four-decade career at MIT. And they are part of the formula that has made Langer Lab one of the most productive research facilities in the world.

Academic, corporate, and government labs—indeed, anyone leading a group of highly talented people from disparate fields—could learn much from Langer’s model. He has a five-pronged approach to accelerating the pace of discoveries and ensuring that they make it out of academia and into the real world as products. It includes a focus on high-impact ideas, a process for crossing the proverbial “valley of death” between research and commercial development, methods for facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration, ways to make the constant turnover of researchers and the limited duration of project funding a plus, and a leadership style that balances freedom and support.

The United States alone spends roughly $500 billion a year on research, but “much of that is mundane,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School who has spent years studying academic and corporate labs. “If there were more highly collaborative, Langer-like labs that focused on high-impact research, the United States would realize its enormous potential for creating wealth.”

Langer’s achievements are remarkable on several counts. His h-index score, a measure of the number of a scholar’s published papers and how often they have been cited, is 230—the highest of any engineer ever. His more than 1,100 current and pending patents have been licensed or sublicensed to some 300 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, and medical device companies, earning him the nickname “the Edison of medicine.” Alone or in collaboration, his lab has given rise to 40 companies, all but one of which are still in existence, either as independent entities or as part of acquiring companies. Collectively, they have an estimated market value of more than $23 billion—excluding Living Proof, a hair products company that Unilever is acquiring for an undisclosed sum.

A final “product” of the lab is people: Scores of the roughly 900 researchers who have earned graduate degrees or worked as postdocs at the lab have gone on to distinguished careers in academia, business, and venture capital. Fourteen have been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, 12 into the National Academy of Medicine.

Langer's Office at MIT

Langer’s office at MIT’s Koch Institute

A bulletin board in the lab’s break room

The multidisciplinary approach is still a work in progress in academia, but it has been gathering steam there over the past decade or so, reflecting universities’ growing interest in tackling real-world problems and spawning new businesses and a recognition that doing so often takes diverse expertise. Although it has long been common in the business world, companies too could improve their results by applying elements of Langer’s research-to-product process, thereby creating brand-new offerings and refreshing or reinventing their businesses again and again.

Focus on High-Impact Problems

One of Langer’s mantras when choosing projects is: Consider the potential impact on society, not the money. The idea is that if you create something that makes a major difference, the customers and the money will come. It’s a profound departure from the approach of many big companies: If an idea for a product is so radically new that discounted cash flow can’t be calculated, they often won’t pursue it, or they give up when the research hits an obstacle—as ambitious research almost always does.

To Langer, “impact” means the number of people an invention could help. The life sciences enterprises that have emerged from his lab have the potential to touch nearly 4.7 billion lives, according to Polaris Partners, a venture capital firm that has financed many of them. For example, one of the lab’s products, on the market since 1996, is a wafer that can be implanted in the brain to deliver chemotherapy directly to the site of a glioblastoma. Another, recently handed over to a new company—Sigilon, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts—is a potential cure for type 1 diabetes, developed in concert with researchers at other universities: Encasing beta cells in a polymer, the researchers have shown, can protect them from the body’s immune system yet allow them to detect the level of sugar in the blood and release the appropriate amounts of insulin.

With such concrete, ambitious projects on the lab’s docket, the customers have indeed come: foundations, companies, scientists in other labs, and government agencies including the National Institutes 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 biomaterials. “Most of what we do is at the interface of materials, biology, 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 existing 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 proponent 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 acquiring start-ups that develop them, other times funding academic research or having their scientists in academic labs.

However, the linear paradigm was never universally true. From the mid 19th century onward, great researchers have pushed the frontiers of basic science precisely to solve pressing societal problems. The Princeton political scientist Donald E. Stokes coined a term for the space in which they work: Pasteur’s quadrant, reflecting Louis Pasteur’s pursuit of a fundamental understanding of microbiology in order to combat disease and food spoilage. Other examples include Bell Labs, whose scientists made basic discoveries while improving and extending communications systems, and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA—one of the most successful innovation organizations ever.

How to Innovate Like Langer Corporations typically shy away from early-stage research because it is expensive, risky, and unpredictable, making it difficult for the organization conducting it to capture the benefits. They could revitalize their research operations by taking an alternative approach and adopting some or all of the following principles from Langer Lab. Pursue use-inspired research. Companies could direct their research efforts toward concrete problems whose solutions may hold enormous long-term payoffs in terms of the impact on humanity and the ROI. (Bob Langer estimates that venture capitalists have reaped at least a 50% internal rate of return on their investments in the companies he has helped launch.) Those efforts should be a good fit with the company’s deep competencies. Nurture deep scientific and engineering expertise in a handful of areas. This could bring customers flocking for solutions to their most pressing problems. Manage intellectual property much more aggressively. Companies could benefit from seeking extremely broad, strong patents. And they could license discoveries they don’t want to pursue themselves, both to generate income and to ensure that someone pursues them. Treat the central research organization as a separate entity, liberated from the incremental demands of established business units. In addition, companies could improve their research efforts if they constrained research projects by time, not by creativity. Staff labs with great—not merely good—scientists and engineers, with an emphasis on making a difference rather than on job stability. Although a number of companies, including Corning, Genentech, Google, IBM, and Novartis, have postdoc positions and sabbatical programs for professors, the vast majority of researchers even at those firms are long-term employees. Companies could instead give highly talented people two- to five-year contracts, and perhaps a piece of the action if their work succeeds. They should insist on team players with the communication skills, patience, and curiosity to excel in a multidisciplinary context. This approach would give them more flexibility in attracting the range of talent they might need to tackle complex problems. Establish consistency over time in the funding of, organizational approach to, and independence of advanced research units. This is no easy task; at GE, for example, R&D funding has yo-yoed from one CEO to the next. Success may require a board with a deep understanding of the R&D function and the willingness to push back against an emphasis on quarterly profits. Ensure robust leadership. This means finding and supporting research directors who are highly respected in their fields and who explicitly see their role as liberating and nurturing the talent around them. Such leaders will have strong networks that can be tapped for recruitment and collaborations; a vision of how the company’s expertise can be applied to create major new businesses that are in keeping with corporate strategy; the ability to communicate that vision to secure internal funding and external support; and the goal of making the research organization’s value blatantly apparent—ensuring that the unit is seen as the engine of renewal.

Langer Lab resides in Pasteur’s quadrant too. Although its researchers devote the bulk of their efforts to applied science and engineering that could solve critical problems, in the process they often push the boundaries of basic science. For example, one of Langer’s most important discoveries was a way to release large-molecule drugs in the body via porous polymers at designated doses and times over several years. This involved expanding an area of physics and math known as percolation theory.

With some notable exceptions—Corning’s efforts in quantum communications and materials for capturing carbon dioxide, IBM’s in cognitive computing and smart cities, Alphabet’s in health care and self-driving vehicles—firms today aren’t striving to connect early-stage research with major real-world applications. “It’s very rare, but I don’t think it needs to be,” says Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If you solve some of society’s big problems, you’ll actually make a lot of money.”

Susan Hockfield, a professor of neuroscience at the Koch Institute and a former president of MIT, agrees. “There’s a lot of appropriate concern and skepticism about the state of corporate R&D,” she says. “For example, pharma corporate R&D invests significantly in very early stage, exploratory research. Couldn’t they be doing better if they partnered more effectively with nonindustry biologists and engineers? And I just finished service on a commission to review the national labs. I’m astonished by what a brilliant idea they are and by the high quality of their research, but could they be turning more of their discoveries into products for the marketplace?”

Build a Bridge Over the Valley of Death

Choosing the right projects to pursue is just the first step, of course; the path to realization can be long and treacherous. Langer has a formula for getting discoveries through the valley of death separating early-stage research and commercial development.

Focus mostly on “platform technologies”—those with multiple applications.

Many corporate and academic labs look to solve specific problems without necessarily thinking beyond them. Langer Lab takes a broader view. In addition to creating a wider market, this strategy allows companies to pursue unanticipated applications, says Terry McGuire, a founding partner of Polaris. For example, Momenta, a company launched in 2001 to exploit new methods for understanding and manipulating the structures of sugar molecules, initially set out to sequence heparins in order to treat diseases such as cancer and acute coronary syndrome. However, it realized early on that it could also use the emerging technology to determine the complex structures in Lovenox, an existing multibillion-dollar drug. That work resulted in a biogeneric product for preventing and treating deep vein thrombosis, which generated more than $1 billion in sales during its first year.

Although the lab’s researchers often have a use in mind, sometimes they envision a variety of applications. For example, Langer got the idea for an implantable microchip that could release drugs for years and could be controlled outside the body while watching a television show on semiconductors; he imagined that chips could not only be used to deliver drugs but also put into TVs to release scents that would enhance the viewing experience.

Obtain a broad patent.

MIT has been a pioneer in patenting and licensing academic discoveries. But Langer has been exceptional in his pursuit of especially strong patents. His goal is to limit, sometimes even block, others from claiming rights to the territory so that companies will be willing to expend the money needed to commercialize a discovery—an investment that must typically cover expensive clinical trials and that greatly exceeds the cost of the research. (Some of Langer’s secrets: Use “great lawyers” and have them challenge one another’s recommendations; eliminate unnecessary words that could restrict a claim; and clearly describe all the terms and supporting experimental tests to prevent ambiguity if the patent is litigated.)

Publish a seminal article in a prestigious journal.

Appearing in a journal such as Nature or Science validates—and advertises—the soundness and importance of the discovery not just to other academics but also to potential business investors.

Prove the concept in animal studies, and don’t push the discovery out of the lab too quickly.

The reason is twofold: to boost the odds that the discovery will work and to minimize the chances that commercialization efforts will flounder—a common occurrence in universities and even the corporate world.

One recent example of a project that benefited from a measured timetable involved the use of ultrasound to rapidly deliver a broad class of therapeutics, including small molecules, macromolecule biologics, and nucleic acids, directly to the gastrointestinal tract (they previously had to be injected). Despite promising initial results and the eagerness of one of the lab’s scientists to start a company to commercialize the discovery, Langer resisted taking that step just yet. He wanted to keep the lab team intact and to continue to work on the technology—for instance, demonstrating its safety through “chronic treatment” studies in large animals (giving them the treatment, say, daily for a month) and developing new formulations that could further enhance the delivery of the drugs.

This extra research, unfettered by commercial timetables, paid off. Over the next 18 months or so, the lab demonstrated that the technology could deliver a whole new class of drugs (unencapsulated nucleic acids), broadening its potential applications. The team also published more articles on the research in peer-reviewed journals, providing proof that the original data was reliable and replicable. Only then did Langer agree to help raise funds for a new company, Suono Bio, to take over development.

Reward the researchers.

MIT awards inventors one-third of royalty income after expenses and fees. (The rest goes to the researchers’ departments or centers, MIT’s technology-licensing office, and the university’s general fund.) In recent decades a growing number of universities have instituted similar policies, but the approach is still highly unusual in the corporate world.

Involve the researchers in commercial development.

Over the years many members of the lab have left for positions at companies that took on their projects, where their passion for getting the technology to market has proved as important as their expertise. “One of the reasons a lot of the companies have done well is that the champions have been our students who’ve gone to them,” Langer says. “They really believed in what they did in the lab and wanted to make it a reality.” Other researchers have advised companies while remaining at the lab or after moving on to other universities. Langer himself serves on the boards of 10 Boston-area start-ups that have emerged from his work. While a growing number of universities have relaxed restrictions on professors’ involving themselves in commercial ventures and have even encouraged commercialization by launching incubators and accelerators, there are still mixed feelings about such activities at many places that lack MIT’s established entrepreneurial culture. And in the corporate world, it’s highly unusual for scientists to become deeply involved in commercialization.

Make licenses contingent on using the technology.

If a firm doesn’t make use of technology it has licensed from the lab, it can be made to relinquish the license. And consider how the wafer for treating brain tumors came to market: A company uninterested in the treatment happened to buy the firm that had licensed the technology. MIT got it to agree to launch a start-up to develop the wafer in return for a lower licensing fee. Few universities—or companies—manage their patents as aggressively as MIT does. Consequently, many of their potentially useful discoveries aren’t exploited.

Forge a Collaborative Multidisciplinary Team

A team working on an oral drug-delivery device that could sit in the stomach gradually releasing medicine for weeks or months came up with a star-shaped design. Then a mechanical engineer with modeling experience joined the effort and began to ask questions. Why had the team chosen a star? Why not other shapes? The team evaluated several possibilities, including hexagons and a variety of stars, and found that a six-pointed star performed best in terms of its ability to fit inside a capsule and stay in the stomach. The new team member also raised considerations about the stiffness of the arms and center, the strength of the elastomer at the interface, and the size of the unfolded device. This turned the conversation to materials that might enable the device to last longer.

“That’s what happens when you bring together folks with different backgrounds,” says Giovanni Traverso, a Harvard gastroenterologist, biomedical engineer, and MIT research affiliate who heads the team. “It leads to new insights and new ways of thinking about the problem.” The teams at Langer Lab include chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineers; molecular biologists; medical clinicians; veterinarians; materials scientists; physicists; and pharmaceutical chemists. Members from different disciplines sit side by side in the labs and offices that honeycomb the sixth floor of the Koch Institute.

Multidisciplinary labs are sprouting up as academia recognizes their value in tackling challenges ranging from cancer to global warming. (One of the hallmarks of the Stand Up to Cancer campaign is its funding of such teams.) But the revolution is still in early days. The 2016 MIT report “Convergence: The Future of Health,” coauthored by Susan Hockfield, highlights the importance of bringing together engineering, physical, computational, mathematical, and biomedical sciences “to help solve many of the world’s grand challenges.” It calls for ambitious reforms in education, industry, and government, including the creation of a “culture of convergence” in academia and industry and changes to government research-funding practices.

Langer’s reputation, the challenges his lab takes on, and the career opportunities afforded, including the chance to participate in start-ups, attract lots of applicants. The lab has 119 researchers from all over the world, plus 30 to 40 undergraduates each semester. It receives 4,000 to 5,000 applications for the 10 to 20 postdoc positions that open up each year and conducts global searches when specialized skills are needed for particular projects.

It’s a given that applicants must have outstanding academic credentials and be highly motivated. Beyond that, the leadership team of Langer, Traverso, and Ana Jaklenec, a biomedical engineer and MIT staff scientist, looks for people who “are nice, get along well with others, and are good communicators”—vital qualities given that the lab’s researchers must constantly explain their fields to coworkers and find ways to conduct experiments that work for everyone. Differences in technical languages, work practices, values, and even ways of defining problems constitute one of the most formidable challenges of a multidisciplinary lab, says Hockfield, a champion of convergence during her eight years at MIT’s helm.

Jaklenec showed me a whiteboard filled with equations. It was from a meeting of two postdocs—a biologist and a biomedical engineer who were collaborating on a single-injection polio vaccine that could stay in the body and be released in pulses over time. The biologist was exploring the mechanism that degrades the strain of virus used in the vaccine, while the biomedical engineer was working on thermostabilization. The two encountered a problem: Their data sets didn’t make sense together. It turned out that they had run their experiments with different concentrations of the vaccine: The engineer’s were those used clinically, while the biologist’s were those called for by the analytical methods of her field. The researchers had to align their experiments so that they could compare results. Such issues are not uncommon. “The challenge is to get people to talk the same language and also recognize that for certain things, there’s no single expert,” Traverso says.

An Unusual Road to High-Impact Research In the early 1970s, as Bob Langer was completing a PhD in chemical engineering at MIT, the United States was rocked by the OPEC embargo and the resulting oil crisis—making him a hot commodity in the eyes of oil and chemical companies (he received 20 job offers in the field). An interview at an Exxon operation in Baton Rouge prompted a seminal insight. “One of the engineers said to me, ‘If you could just increase the yield of this one chemical by point-one percent, that would be wonderful—that’s worth billions of dollars,’” Langer recalls. “I remember flying back to Boston that night thinking, ‘Do I really want to spend my life doing this?’” He applied to colleges for jobs developing chemistry curricula. When none replied—“probably because as a chemical engineer, I wasn’t in the right box”—he wrote to hospitals, “because I wanted to help people.” Again he received no offers. Then a colleague suggested that he contact Judah Folkman, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital who had a reputation for hiring unusual people. Folkman had a controversial idea: that cancerous tumors emit chemical signals that stimulate angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels. If the signals could be blocked, Folkman theorized, tumors’ growth could be halted. He hired Langer to isolate the first angiogenesis inhibitors. This involved identifying candidates from cartilage, which has no blood supply (Langer got cow bones from a slaughterhouse) and inventing polymer systems that could deliver large molecules over time. Angiogenesis inhibitors ultimately became instrumental in treating a number of cancers, and polymers have become an important way to deliver drugs and vaccines and to help grow new body tissue, including skin, cartilage, and spinal cord. Langer returned to MIT in 1977 as an assistant professor, initially in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science (because no chemical engineering department at a university would hire him). It gave him tremendous freedom, and he continued working on drug delivery, angiogenesis inhibitors, and tissue engineering, obtaining funding from companies when his ideas proved too radical for government grants. Many senior faculty members of the department didn’t believe in his ideas and suggested that he look for a new job. However, by the mid-1980s his discoveries, publications, and start-ups began winning recognition. One of MIT’s 13 Institute Professors, Langer is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the National Medal of Science, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

Even if there is no obvious need or fit for them, Langer often brings in “superstars” who have unusual credentials. “You take a chance on people,” he says. “Gio is a good example.” Traverso had earned a PhD in molecular biology under Bert Vogelstein, a renowned cancer biologist at Johns Hopkins; his doctoral research involved novel molecular tests for the early detection of colon cancer. When he contacted Langer, he was finishing an internal medicine residency at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and trying to figure out what to do with a gastroenterology fellowship he had landed at Massachusetts General Hospital. He told Langer that although he was interested in developing systems for delivering drugs in the GI tract, he was not an engineer. Langer hired him anyway.

The bet paid off. Traverso demonstrated the concept of several different approaches to delivering drugs through devices in the GI tract. The Gates Foundation saw that the work might solve problems it wanted to address in poor countries and provided significant funding. Grants also came in from Novo Nordisk (to develop microneedles for internal injections), the Charles Stark Draper Lab (for new ingestible systems), and Hoffmann-La Roche (for the delivery of a new class of drugs).

Embrace Turnover

Like all academic labs, Langer’s sees a constant flow of people joining or leaving. Doctoral students typically stay four or five years, postdocs two or three, and undergraduates participate for as little as a semester and as much as four years. Newcomers are perpetually being trained, and people may leave at the peak of their productivity. But Langer and many colleagues think the turnover has positives that vastly outweigh these downsides. Problems are viewed with fresh eyes—he calls it “constant stimulation.” The turnover is fairly predictable and tied to the length of projects; even huge grants are structured so that the lab can gradually scale up. The finite tenure of most of the researchers, combined with the limited duration of grants (typically three to five years, with renewals dependent on meeting goals), imposes pressure to get results.

“A lot of cynicism has been thrown on the academic research lab model. We are told it is inefficient,” Hockfield says. “But it’s brilliant. To bring together people from different generations and levels of experience—it’s fantastic. The faculty member has a wealth of experience and understanding and knows the literature and the history of the field. Students and postdocs have a lot of energy and ambition and crazy ideas. The faculty member helps get those crazy ideas channeled. Undergraduates, wonderfully, often don’t know that something’s impossible. They don’t know enough not to ask unsophisticated questions. There are very few things that make you step back and wonder about your foundational assumptions more than a really smart undergraduate asking, ‘Whoa, how does that work?’”

A highly motivated superstar team with limited tenure; an accomplished scientist leader; time-limited projects; intense pressure to get results—it all sounds like the DARPA formula, proof that the model has application far beyond academic settings.

Lead Without Micromanaging

One rainy day at their home on Cape Cod, Langer and his wife, Laura, talked about how his management of the lab differs from the norm. “In my discussions with a range of graduate students at other places, they often describe their research advisers as control freaks—which is understandable, because their lab is their baby,” said Laura, who has a PhD in neuroscience from MIT. “They may want to manage every part of the research. It’s very hard for them to let their students explore and make mistakes. But not giving people the room to figure things out themselves can stifle them or train them to not take potentially innovative risks.”

Langer nodded in agreement. Under his leadership, everyone is involved in offering ideas for projects and choosing which ones to pursue. “It’s a team effort,” he said. “It’s empowering people; it’s letting everybody feel they are valued and that it’s OK to suggest things.” This stands in contrast to most academic and corporate labs, where the director selects the projects.

Current and former lab members told me that Langer exposes people to possibilities and lets them decide what to work on. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a professor of biomedical engineering and medical sciences at Columbia who worked at the lab in the 1980s and 1990s, says she took that lesson to heart and runs her 40-person lab the same way: “I never tell people what to do but, rather, help them see the possibilities, let them really get excited about one of them, and let them work on their own ideas.” Many if not most of Langer’s postdocs and research scientists and at least some of the doctoral students are working on several projects.

Life in Langer Lab Profiles of two researchers capture the collaborative, free environment. Oliver “Ollie” Jonas Oliver Jonas had earned a doctorate in biophysics from Leipzig University and was working at a Boston venture capital firm in 2011, when he reached out to Bob Langer about joining his lab at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Jonas, now 37, had an idea for a microdevice that could be implanted in an individual’s tumors to quickly and simultaneously test numerous chemotherapies and identify which would be the most effective for that particular person. Oliver Jonas in Langer Lab “It would be a very multidisciplinary project, and I thought Bob’s lab would be a great place to make it happen, given its expertise in drug delivery, implanted devices, and cancer along with Bob’s reputation for being a great mentor,” Jonas says. “We met in person. I think he recognized the potential of the idea right away. He was excited to make it happen.” Jonas was also drawn by the lab’s extensive network of accomplished alumni and their rave accounts of the highly collaborative environment. He talked to a number of them before accepting a position when one was offered. “I was really amazed at how positively they spoke about their experience and about Bob personally.” Jonas joined the lab as a postdoctoral scientist in 2012. His initial research funding came from the venture capital firm he had worked for. Once he had some early results, he won grants from the National Institutes of Health and nonprofit foundations. Part of Langer’s formula is to hire extremely bright “nice” people, encourage them to do research that could help people in the real world, and support them without micromanaging. One way he does the latter is by “encouraging people to think broadly or differently about something,” says Jonas. “He usually does that by asking questions like ‘Have you thought about doing it this other way? Have you talked to this person who’s dealt with a similar problem? Have you thought about doing it the complete opposite way?’ “He really trusts the boots on the ground,” Jonas says. “I’ve never heard him outright say no to an idea or an experiment I was planning. I think that’s important, because ‘no’ can have a detrimental effect; it can make you scared to try something the next time. If he thought you were going into a dead end or a blind alley, he would warn you, but again, it wouldn’t be a ‘no’; it would be, ‘If you don’t get this and this type of data, then it probably doesn’t make sense to go down that track.’” At the beginning of projects or when people have just joined the lab, Langer offers lots of input. He then backs off. For example, Jonas says that during his first year or two, he met with Langer every four to six weeks for 15 to 30 minutes about broad issues, such as the direction of the project. “You come to these meetings prepared,” Jonas says. “You know specifically what you’re looking for. The meetings would be very to the point. We don’t waste any time.” In addition, Langer’s researchers know they can e-mail him with small questions or specific requests; he typically responds within minutes. When researchers have problems outside his own areas of expertise, Langer immediately connects them with people inside or outside the lab who can assist them. “He has an amazing ability to always think of people who can help you. He will reach out to them right away,” Jonas says. For example, creating prototypes of the microdevice, which is about the size of a grain of rice, required special micromachining skills that Jonas and others in the lab lacked. “Having the ability to create prototypes over and over again right in the lab is important. You can do that externally, but it costs you weeks every time you make a new one,” he explains. So Langer connected him with a professor at the Koch Institute who had that expertise—Michael Cima, who became a “co-mentor” to Jonas. Another example concerned how to formulate drugs so that they would come out of the microdevice at a controlled rate. “I’d never done anything like that before, and I needed Bob’s help,” Jonas says. “He right away thought of three different polymers I should try.” Langer also suggested that Jonas confer with Gaurav Sahay, another researcher in the lab (now a professor at Oregon Health Science University). At the time, Sahay was working on getting nanoparticles to penetrate cells. “When I approached him, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to help me,” Jonas says. “But as we started talking, we saw that our two projects came together in one very specific way. And Bob had that in his head. That was pretty cool—it wasn’t an obvious connection.” Jonas’s core team at the lab now includes three technicians: a biomedical engineer who helps build prototypes; a biomedical engineer who assists with the formulation and release of drugs and with animal testing; and a former medical student transitioning to a scientific career, who helps with various engineering and biological aspects of the project. (A fourth technician, a physicist who focused on optics, has left the group.) Like other researchers at the Koch Institute, those at Langer Lab often have simultaneous collaborations in progress with groups within and outside their home lab. Jonas is working with cancer biologists at two of the Institute’s labs who are trying to apply his technology. He is also working with physicians at Memorial Sloan Kettering, in New York City, on an ongoing clinical trial of his microdevice in breast cancer patients. Jonas assumed positions on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston last May. (Langer helped him land them.) The Brigham intends to begin clinical trials of his microdevice in patients with ovarian and lung cancers in the second quarter of this year. “Our main focus now is getting this into patients more broadly,” he says. “We’ll have to do much more of that. That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the Brigham. If the clinical trials are successful, commercialization may come next.” As of January Jonas was still spending a couple of hours a day on projects at Langer Lab, where he is now a visiting scientist. “Some people might look at someone leaving as a loss to the lab, but I don’t think Bob ever views it that way,” Jonas says. “He has the wisdom to see beyond the immediate loss to the benefit of my graduating from being his student to being part of his network. That’s part of the reason he has an amazing network of alumni who are all incredibly loyal to him.” Mark Tibbitt When Mark Tibbitt enrolled in graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder, in 2007, he intended to pursue the development of renewable energy sources. “That was something I felt the world needed to tackle,” he says. But shortly after arriving in Boulder he met Kristi Anseth, whose work focused on biomaterials, particularly tissue engineering and drug delivery. He was inspired by her passion for her research as well as her approach to science and changed course to work with her. Her lab was multidisciplinary and highly collaborative—like Langer Lab, where she had been a postdoc. “I absolutely loved the environment she had created,” recalls Tibbitt, who earned a PhD in chemical engineering, mainly for research in tissue engineering. Mark Tibbitt with the prototypes of an artificial trachea he is developing When he was nearing the end of graduate school and contemplating where to apply for a postdoc position, Anseth suggested Langer Lab. She e-mailed Langer. “She told me Mark was a superstar of superstars,” says Langer, who asked Tibbitt to send him a cover letter and a CV. “The process was really quick and efficient,” says Tibbitt, now 31. “I sent my materials, and Bob called me and said, ‘Let’s get you out here.’” Once again Langer’s network of alumni and collaborators had landed his lab a high-potential researcher. Langer told Tibbitt about the areas where the lab had funding for open positions. “I’ll let you pick which ones sound the most exciting to you,” he said. “Timewise, what’s best for you? I want you to be successful. If you have stuff to finish up there, do it. We’re ready whenever.” Tibbitt started out on a project to invent implantable drug-delivery systems for treating heart-valve disease, ones that would release medicine slowly over time. The original approach involves surgically placing a material infused with the drug near the targeted site. The research has since expanded to the design of injectable materials that can be applied in a less-invasive manner and to applications including the treatment of eye diseases and cancer. Tibbitt also became involved in research aimed at figuring out how to organize complex structures in three-dimensional space. One ongoing project is building an artificial trachea. “The trachea has interesting mechanical needs,” he explains. “It can’t collapse when you cough, and it needs to be able to stretch when you bend your head back. If you have too short a trachea, that can be problematic.” Tibbitt and Héloïse Ragelle, another postdoc in the lab, are developing unique biomaterials that could fit this bill. Another project is building models of pathological processes—for instance, how immune cells interact with early-stage cancer cells. “If we can build little models outside the body, they can help us understand those processes better,” Tibbitt says. The freedom to pursue myriad opportunities is one aspect of Langer Lab that Tibbitt greatly appreciates. In contrast to other places, where he might have been confined to a specific area or to learning just one technique, “There were no defined boundaries on what I might do here,” he says. “This place has a culture of tackling big problems that are broadly focused on health and materials science. Bob wants people to think about things that will truly have an impact on society. His attitude is, ‘Ask a big question; we’ll get you the resources to tackle it, and we’ll put you in touch with the right people to help you figure it out.’” How does one end up working on multiple projects? “In my experience, it’s rarely been formal. It’s more often chatting in the lunchroom and finding someone you’d like to interact with,” Tibbitt says. A 2-1/2-year collaboration on injectable gels for delivering drugs originated that way. Tibbitt was chatting with Eric Appel, a chemist by training who was another postdoc in the lab. (He has since become an assistant professor at Stanford.) “We found out that we had similar research backgrounds in the design and application of polymeric hydrogels. We were actually working on two separate things: Eric was synthesizing chemically modified biopolymers, and I was fabricating drug-loaded nanoparticles. We both read a few scientific papers suggesting that by combining the polymers Eric was making and the nanoparticles I was making, we could invent a new class of biocompatible hydrogels with properties that would make the gels suitable for injectable drug-delivery systems. We said, ‘Let’s just try this together.’ It worked, and we ran with it.” Didn’t they have to get Langer’s permission? “We needed to ask Bob for money to try the idea in the first place, but it wasn’t going to be that expensive, and Bob is usually well funded,” Tibbitt says. After the initial research proved that the concept had legs, the team, with Langer’s assistance, secured funding from Hoffmann-La Roche. Langer is the extreme opposite of a control freak, Tibbitt emphasizes. “Bob has a fantastic ability to frame a research challenge,” he says. “And he has outstanding intuition for what sets of data you would need to publish a paper or to approach investors and convince them that an idea is a good one. But when you’re discussing ideas, he is fairly Socratic. He rarely says immediately, ‘This is a great idea. Do it.’ And he certainly won’t say, ‘No, that’s a horrible idea. Don’t do it.’ Rather, he’ll ask questions to get you to assess it more rigorously and push you to consider what’s going to have the biggest impact on people’s lives. “If you are convinced that it’s a good idea, and you haven’t heard a no, you’ll go do it, and maybe you’ll prove yourself right. But more important, his approach teaches you how to analyze your own ideas, and it teaches you and your peers how to ask one another questions.” While Tibbitt and Appel were working together, they came up with the idea of using their injectable gels for cancer immunotherapy. Langer said that he lacked the knowledge to assess it and suggested they contact Glenn Dranoff, a prominent immuno-oncologist then at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (now at Novartis). “As a young postdoc, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable e-mailing him out of the blue, but Bob said, ‘I’ll just send a quick introductory e-mail,’” Tibbitt recalls. “And of course, Glenn then said, ‘Yeah, I’d be happy to help.’ He read our proposal that night and gave us some feedback. And he was able to say, ‘This is where it’s going to run into challenges. People have tried this, that, the other thing.’ Glenn’s expertise and insights potentially saved us months of wasted time.” Unlike many researchers at the lab, Tibbitt reports directly to Langer. Although Langer gives him lots of autonomy, he is there when he’s needed. “I meet with Bob formally about once a month, and he’s always willing to meet more,” Tibbitt says. “He is also extremely helpful by e-mail, in the hallways, and at group meetings. He somehow always seems to know what’s going on with everybody’s projects and with everybody’s lives. He’ll ask how different projects are going, but it’s never aimed at exerting pressure. It’s more because he’s excited.” Tibbitt will leave Langer Lab in June for a faculty position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. “I’ll be teaching classes and running my own lab. So I’m starting to think about what makes things tick here,” he says. He cites “a productive chaos that allows the creative process to unfold more fluidly” and an egalitarian, open culture where people with different scientific and engineering backgrounds work together as equals, helping one another overcome challenges. Last but not least is Langer’s benign leadership—the way he genuinely cares about his researchers, says Tibbitt, noting that Langer was “very, very helpful” when he was applying for faculty jobs. “My sense is that all he cares about is not what I can do for him but where I’m going in the next five or 10 years,” he says. “He wants it to be a great place, and he wants me to do well. That’s a really nice feeling. You come into a place where you feel welcome and supported, and you want to do well in return.” This sidebar appeared only in the online version of this article, on HBR.org

Langer treats Jaklenec and Traverso as coprincipal investigators—another departure from the norm. Power is distributed throughout the lab, accumulated on the basis of people’s ideas and initiative and the funding that their research attracts. Langer gives researchers—especially graduate students—lots of guidance in the beginning, to make sure that they get off to a good start and that projects are optimally structured. He also helps decide which options are considered. For example, at the outset of the project to develop the drug-delivery device that would stay in the stomach for a long period, he and Traverso decided to explore two possibilities: one that would float in the stomach and one that would adhere to the stomach wall. After conducting a feasibility study, they chose to pursue the floating option and figured out what major issues would need to be solved—and then Langer largely bowed out. “After that, I don’t tell people what to do,” he says. “From grade school to high school and college and even to a certain extent graduate school, you’re judged by how well you answer somebody else’s questions. That gives you a grade on a test. But if you think about the way you’re judged in life, I don’t think it is by how good your answers are; it’s by how good your questions are. I want to help people make that transition from giving good answers to asking good questions.”

Gary Pisano sees this philosophy as key to the lab’s success. “The tendency would be to say, ‘I’m going to tell you what to do so that you can do better and the lab will do better,’” he explains. “But if you do that, you create a different place—people are going to say, ‘OK, Bob, you tell me what to do.’ He doesn’t want that kind of lab. His lab is one where people solve their own problems, and that’s why they wind up being great professors and scientists in the business world.”

At the same time, Langer makes sure that researchers know they can count on him and on the people in his network if they run into trouble—an approach that Aimee L. Hamilton, an assistant professor of management at the University of Denver who has studied Langer Lab, calls “guided autonomy.” His responsiveness is legendary. His iPad seems glued to him, and he uses it to answer e-mails within minutes. Cato T. Laurencin, a University Professor at the University of Connecticut who earned his PhD under Langer in the 1980s, recalls that a student of his once dug up Langer’s cell phone number and called him with a question about a paper Langer had written. “He called her back from Finland 10 minutes later.”

Langer also goes out of his way to help people leaving his lab get good jobs, and he stays in touch with hundreds of alumni, providing assistance if needed. (In his farewell meeting with James Dahlman, he offered to go over Dahlman’s grant applications.) He is deeply connected to those in his network. For instance, he refers to many of the venture capitalists who have financed his start-ups—a group including Terry McGuire, of Polaris; Noubar Afeyan, of Flagship; and Mark Levin, of Third Rock—as friends, and means it. (Langer, McGuire, and their two daughters vacationed together last year in Bordeaux, and Langer’s daughter was in the wedding of McGuire’s.)

Real-World Results Since 1987 Bob Langer and his researchers have helped found 40 companies, often in collaboration with scientists in other labs at MIT and at other institutions. To date all but one have made it. A sampling is below. Company: Enzytech (acquired by Alkermes)

Year Launched: 1987

Products/Technology: Microspheres for delivering drugs

Existing or Potential Applications: Schizophrenia, narcotic addiction, type 2 diabetes

Market Capitalization: $7.2 billion (Alkermes) Company: Moderna

Year Launched: 2011

Products/Technology: Messenger-RNA-based drugs

Existing or Potential Applications: Cancer, heart disease, vaccines, infectious diseases, pulmonary disease

Market Capitalization: $5 billion Company: Momenta

Year Launched: 2001

Products/Technology: Sequencing complex sugar-based therapeutics

Existing or Potential Applications: Multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, cancer

Market Capitalization: $840 million Company: Advanced Inhalation Research (acquired by Acorda)

Year Launched: 1997

Products/Technology: Drug-delivering aerosols that rely on large particles, which resist clumping

Existing or Potential Applications: Diabetes, asthma, Parkinson’s disease

Market Capitalization: $525 million Company: Selecta

Year Launched: 2007

Products/Technology: Targeted nanoparticle-based immunotherapies and vaccines

Existing or Potential Applications: Gout, genetic disorders, allergies, autoimmune diseases, HPV-associated cancers, nicotine addiction, malaria

Market Capitalization: $228 million Sources Robert Langer, Polaris Partners, public information.

Note Market capitalizations are as of mid-September 2016 or acquisition date. The value of private companies is based on VC financing.

The investment in his network pays valuable dividends in the form of productive research collaborations, referrals of extraordinary students to his lab, and manpower for the start-ups. Langer not only paves the way for lab members to launch start-ups but also taps his network if a need at one emerges down the road. “Bob often has a great idea of somebody who would be a great fit,” says Amy Schulman, the CEO or executive chair of three companies that grew out of Langer Lab. “And people often reach out to Bob when they’re thinking of changing jobs, because he is incredibly discreet and knows a lot of opportunities. So it goes both ways.”

CONCLUSION

When people who have worked with Bob Langer talk about him, one hears a common refrain: he is an integral part of his research-to-product model and a brilliant individual who can’t be replicated. But this doesn’t mean that his model, including his “Mr. Nice Guy” leadership style, can’t be replicated. What if corporations structured their labs like his? What if they nurtured deep expertise in a handful of areas so that customers would come to them with their most pressing problems? What if they enticed superstar researchers by offering opportunities to work on issues that could change the world?

“Maybe companies could set up a research operation where the best of the best are flowing through, trying to do something audacious in a few years rather than spending 30 years there worrying about their next promotion,” Gary Pisano says. His Harvard colleague Willy Shih adds that such an approach would not only allow companies to tackle more-ambitious projects but also help them kill mediocre or poor projects faster. “The flow of people through the lab would have the natural consequence of sunsetting ideas that don’t stand the test of a fresh look,” he points out.

Bob Langer says, “I want to address problems that can change the world and make it a better place. That’s the thread throughout the science I’ve done my whole life. The companies I’ve helped found seem like a natural extension. I wanted to see what I did get out to the world; that made a difference to me.” By drawing on the Langer Lab values and model, companies could make the world a better place and make lots of money in the process.