There is no doubt in my mind that Biden would have been incapable of doing this.
How an Idea from Tuck Helped Launch Operation Warp Speed
The United States’ effort to provide COVID-19 vaccines to the world was one of the greatest government achievements in modern history. Tuck Professor Ron Adner’s ecosystem strategy framework contributed to its creation.
On March 31, 2020, Alex Azar D’88, then the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was on the phone with the CEO of Johnson & Johnson. Twenty days earlier, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and an HHS division had hoped J&J would develop a vaccine for the virus.
The proposed contract was business-as-usual for a partnership between the public sector and Big Pharma, where the government would give the company funds to get started (in this case, a 500-million-dollar grant), and J&J would invest the same amount from its own coffers. J&J’s goal was to start phase 1 clinical trials in September, with no guarantees about final pricing or quantities. But for Azar, who had been the president of Eli Lilly U.S. and had previously served as the Deputy Secretary of HHS in the George W. Bush Administration, the deal with J&J lacked the accountability and urgency demanded by the critical global health crisis. “The standard process made us too reactive,” Azar said. “To manage the crisis we had to shift to think about the ecosystem proactively, and that was the genesis of Operation Warp Speed.”
The next day, Azar spoke with members of his leadership team and expressed his frustration with the tentative, lumbering progression towards a solution. The country needed a vaccine as soon as possible; it could not be limited by the traditional processes that led to decade-long lags between drug discovery and distribution. Congress had just passed a two-trillion-dollar COVID-19 relief package and Azar knew that getting the country up and running again would justify an unprecedented investment. He told his team to imagine what was possible if money were no object. “What could physically happen if we put the full weight of the U.S. government behind this?” he asked. Their answer became Operation Warp Speed, an innovative reconfiguration of the entire ecosystem necessary to develop, manufacture, distribute, and administer an effective vaccine.
“To manage the crisis we had to shift to think about the ecosystem proactively, and that was the genesis of Operation Warp Speed.”
Secretary Azar visited Tuck this past February to discuss the strategy behind Operation Warp Speed in a fireside chat with Professor Ron Adner. Why? Because a key foundation for the way in which Azar and his senior leadership team approached creating this new ecosystem was anchored in Adner’s approach to ecosystem strategy. Adner, the Nathaniel D’1906 and Martha E. Leverone Memorial Professor of Business Administration at Tuck, is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Other Miss, which lays out his novel framework for innovation ecosystems. In it, he defines an ecosystem as “the structure through which partners interact to deliver a value proposition to the end consumer,” and he shows how the difference between great innovations that succeed and great innovations that fail comes down to looking beyond your own firm and execution tasks and expanding your strategy to account for the co-innovators and partners who must come together for your innovation to deliver on its promise.
Adner developed and wrote The Wide Lens at Tuck, where he has taught in the MBA program and for Tuck Executive Education since 2008. His relationship with Azar began long before the pandemic. Azar first invited Adner to Eli Lilly in 2016 to help with the ecosystem strategy for an important product launch. When Azar became the leader of HHS, he again called on Adner to educate his senior leadership team. Adner first visited HHS in the summer of 2018, where he spoke at a leadership retreat and ran breakout sessions for senior members to apply his ecosystem strategy to key initiatives. “At that point,” Azar recalled, “it was about policy transformation, regulatory change, how you think about public policy as an innovation, and how you take the negatives in the adoption chain and convert them into being at least neutral.” By the time Adner went back to HHS in January of 2020, this work had influenced the FDA approach to vaping, the NIH approach to translational science, and the Surgeon General’s approach to the opioid crisis — all problems that crossed boundaries between consumers, public health, and the private sector. “I embedded Ron’s Wide Lens strategy as our way of thinking at HHS from day one,” Azar said, “and it was definitely on our minds as we formed a plan for the COVID-19 vaccine.”
That plan, which was dubbed Operation Warp Speed, began to take shape during April of 2020. With his deep experience in both the pharmaceutical industry and government, Azar was intimately aware of the capabilities each brought to the endeavor, as well as the adoption constraints that would slow down critical collaboration. “Secretary Azar was in a unique position to think through the complexity of this ecosystem,” said Adner. He knew the government needed Big Pharma’s drug development and manufacturing skills, but he also knew about the resources available from across the executive branch, such as the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, which could turbocharge the operation. Azar and his team dove into the details of what each participant would need to have in place in order to engage and went about creating the conditions that brought them on board productively. “Starting with a strategy that considers the ecosystem challenges in advance, rather than one that is surprised as each new piece arrives, is the difference between an ambitious vision and an actual achievement,” said Adner. “What this team accomplished was absolutely extraordinary!”
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https://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/news/articles/how-idea-tuck-helped-launch-operation-warp-speed