Phenomenal article! This is the kind of stuff I hoped to read about when I picked up Robert Buderi's book "Where Futures Converge" on the history of Kendall Square. He has a chapter on NIBR, but mostly just talks about they changed the NECCO wafer water tower into DNA (which is still cool).
Your article makes me think about two aspects of innovation:
1. The transcience of innovative enviornments: "The place to be" changes periodically. As far as the Boston academic environment is concerned, you had the order of the Whitehead, the Broad, and the Wyss Institutes, each with their respective heyday, and each losing their luster once the core group of innovators dispersed, external factors diluted their initial vision, or they became saturated with administration and second-tier science. More broadly, people talk about Bell Labs and Xerox Parc as standards of innovative environments, each with their own rise and fall.
2. The struggle to establish free-standing innovative environments: There has been some recent excitement to create the "next Bell Labs" by pouring a bunch of capital into a new institute. Arena Bioworks touted this slogan with a new financial model (and swiftly failed), Episteme is funded by Sam Altman, and Aithyra started out of a donation from the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation. Is this a feasible approach to crafting an innovation institute, or does it need to be tethered by a large corporation like NIBR was (or like Google DeepMind)?
I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems like there's a window of opportunity where you can execute curiosity-driven research before shareholder incentives suffocate internal R&D. From a distant, outside perspective, maybe the Arc Institute has the characteristics of "the place to be", but I'm just guessing. It's hard to say that any current BioPharma has the features of a truly innovative institute.
Phenomenal article! This is the kind of stuff I hoped to read about when I picked up Robert Buderi's book "Where Futures Converge" on the history of Kendall Square. He has a chapter on NIBR, but mostly just talks about they changed the NECCO wafer water tower into DNA (which is still cool).
Your article makes me think about two aspects of innovation:
1. The transcience of innovative enviornments: "The place to be" changes periodically. As far as the Boston academic environment is concerned, you had the order of the Whitehead, the Broad, and the Wyss Institutes, each with their respective heyday, and each losing their luster once the core group of innovators dispersed, external factors diluted their initial vision, or they became saturated with administration and second-tier science. More broadly, people talk about Bell Labs and Xerox Parc as standards of innovative environments, each with their own rise and fall.
2. The struggle to establish free-standing innovative environments: There has been some recent excitement to create the "next Bell Labs" by pouring a bunch of capital into a new institute. Arena Bioworks touted this slogan with a new financial model (and swiftly failed), Episteme is funded by Sam Altman, and Aithyra started out of a donation from the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation. Is this a feasible approach to crafting an innovation institute, or does it need to be tethered by a large corporation like NIBR was (or like Google DeepMind)?
I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems like there's a window of opportunity where you can execute curiosity-driven research before shareholder incentives suffocate internal R&D. From a distant, outside perspective, maybe the Arc Institute has the characteristics of "the place to be", but I'm just guessing. It's hard to say that any current BioPharma has the features of a truly innovative institute.
Have seen the cultural shift first hand within NIBR. Great piece.
Cudos to your article about former Novartis research. I have referenced it in a short piece about some deal making activities from Novartis:
https://transkript.de/artikel/2025/novartis-meldet-sich-mit-zwei-sirna-deals-zurueck/
at the end.
Best
georg
Great write-up 👍