COVID-19, digital transformation, and the Moderna model

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-authorof "Competing in the Age of AI" Marco Iansiti discussed how Moderna used its vaccinations and therapeutics technology platform to produce a viable COVID-19 vaccine in 25 days in his keynote at KMWorld Connect 2020.

"So in a process of 2 weeks, essentially, we all went virtual. Well, those of us that could, went virtual and, everything changed around the general transformation, right? So the, the post COVID-19, the answer is digital transformation. Now what's the question, right? So everybody's out there making changes across the board, partly because of virtualization and partly because the amount of uncertainty that is involvedin predicting sort of what's going on in any aspect of the business, you know, supply chain, uh, customer needs, R and D what is the uncertainties is huge," Iansiti said. 

The core of Moderna is a software and data platform, it functions as one system of record, he said. Along with working on COVID vaccines, Moderna offers different innoculations to a variety of other theraputics. 

"And we're seeing this in action. I mean, you see this vaccine was produced in 25 days, which is like an insane, at least short amount of time. It was essentially a variant on existing things, essentially vaccination technology platform and therapeutics technology platform that just spent out one additional application that ended up being incredibly important," Iansiti said.