The Howard Hughes Medical Institute made news last week by announcing a $600 million grant to a fund a new pipeline of biomedical research. What makes this newsworthy is not the size of the grant, but how these hundreds of millions are being spent to fund an extremely ambitious, even risky portfolio of research.
The Hughes Institute follows the principle of investing in “people, not projects” — a significant difference from the way research philanthropies and businesses usually allocate innovation resources. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, grants are earmarked to tackle fairly narrowly defined disease categories such as colorectal cancer or osteoporosis. HHMI in contrast has apportioned their $600 million to 56 scientists from around the world who have been selected through a competitive application process as “investigators."
Here’s how Hughes describes the relationship they create with their investigators through their grants: Hughes Insitute investigators have the freedom to explore and, if necessary, to change direction in their research. Moreover, they have support to follow their ideas through to fruition — even if that process takes many years.
The investigator program is designed to attract and fund the most innovative researchers in the world without placing constraints on their research agenda. For the $600 million announcement, Hughes Institute further loosened the rules of its competition to allow scientists to directly apply without the usual required sponsorship of a research institution. Their goal: encourage an even more divergent and diverse array of research interests to compete for an award.
Through its investigator program, Hughes is creating an innovation portfolio by investing in a portfolio of researchers. Past investigator competitions have focused on physician scientists. A future competition will target younger researches who are in the “angel” phase of their research careers. Hughes' investigator relationships currently number 300 researchers affiliated with 24 universities, and include 124 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and 12 Nobel Prize winners. Three hundred of the brightest and most innovative scientists in the world, well-funded to pursue their own interests and unconstrained by time limits or research boundaries … Has the Hughes Institute optimized their odds of a game-changing breakthrough? We think so, because their approach encourages an approach to innovation we describe as emergent strategy.
“People, not projects” is a great way to think about funding the furthest-reaching part of your innovation portfolio to target the boldest, most potentially disruptive solutions. Knowing that 90 percent of new ventures start off following the wrong strategy, it is important to make sure that your innovation resources are not operating under constraints that punish failure, learning, adaptation, and reorientation of the research agenda. Supporting an emergent strategy in your innovation portfolio means that you are able to deploy your innovation resources to encourage rapid iteration, maximize learning and re-direct the plan to pursue the right strategy as it becomes clearer. An emergent strategy is one where your innovators are actually rewarded for failing as long as they fail relatively cheaply and generate useful learning from that failure.
By placing unconstrained bets on people who are proven divergent thinkers, nimble performers, and highly risk-tolerant, you encourage a test-and-learn mentality that is critical to supporting emergent strategy. A Hughes investigator might begin investigating a question like, “Which genetic changes alter behavior throughout evolution?” Along the way, they may unlock a clue to preventing the common cold. Supporting an emergent innovation strategy means that investigator has the freedom and incentive to follow the new lead and potentially develop a very different, but high-impact solution. This is precisely what Hughes Medical Institute is banking will happen with its 56 newly minted investigators.