Hello from Hamburg,
What if mRNA could be used as a drug? What if laboratory experiments could be replaced by intelligent machines? What if, instead of working on a single therapy, we worked on several at the same time to accelerate the fight against serious diseases? What if we became a company powered by artificial intelligence? These are questions that the American pharmaceutical company Moderna asked itself around the time of its founding in 2010.
Moderna emerged from a venture capital fund dedicated to business ideas that stem from research. Moderna’s founders are working on the mRNA method, which teaches the body how to produce a specific protein that helps our immune system prevent and fight off diseases. A blueprint is introduced into human cells, turning them into producers of important antibodies. Behind this lies the vision of therapies that are precise and personalized, capable of combating serious diseases.
Moderna approaches drug development using a platform model, in which the company works on multiple diseases simultaneously that are caused by the same defect. In this way, the company learns directly from failures in one area to apply those lessons to other disease symptoms. Since its founding, Moderna has consistently pursued the vision of a fully digitized biotech company. From the very beginning, the company documented data from research and preclinical development in a way that provided a solid foundation for the early use of artificial intelligence. By spring 2020, twenty algorithms were in production and twenty more were being used in the development and testing of therapies. When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Europe and the U.S., it was easy for Moderna to fully digitize its mRNA technology to combat the coronavirus, ramp up production of mRNA-based vaccines, and thus make a significant contribution to fighting the pandemic.
At the heart of these forward-looking decisions and opportunities were “what if” questions. Imagining the impossible. Seeing what we don’t know as something interesting. Based on these questions, Moderna and the fund behind it build prototypes that test these hypotheses in practice. In the best-case scenario, this leads to spin-offs that must prove themselves in the market. Just like Moderna.
When the present is fraught with so many uncertainties—as is currently the case—strategy work seems particularly paradoxical: How can we make a reliable statement right now about where our company is headed in the coming years? Five-year plans, a comprehensive vision of the company in x years—these seem implausible to those involved. And yet, more than ever, the organization needs direction: Where do we want to go? What can I rely on? Will my job still exist in the future? Employees and managers are asking themselves these questions with greater urgency than usual.
It’s time for bold hypotheses—strategic ambitions without the expectation that they will come to pass exactly as envisioned. It’s time for “what if” questions that look far into the future—questions that address seemingly unrealistic and overly optimistic scenarios. These suggest a specific future state and then work backward from that state to develop an implementation plan. Like Moderna, which—with its bold vision of a “fully digitalized biotech company” at the time of its founding—documented its business processes across corporate functions, subsequently digitized them, linked them to data, automated them, and personalized them using AI. This is the opposite of incremental innovation development or scenario planning that starts from the current status quo. Because if the current status is fragile, it does not provide a good starting point for answering the question of how the company will remain competitive in the future. Now is the best time to work on what we have previously considered impossible to implement.
How are you currently addressing the future in your companies? How do you strike a balance between the impossibility of planning for the future and the organization’s legitimate need for guidance?
