The case study examines an unusual question:
Can entrepreneurship itself become a repeatable process?
Most venture capital firms operate in roughly the same way. Entrepreneurs start companies independently, then venture capitalists evaluate those companies and decide which ones to finance.
Flagship turned that model around.
Rather than waiting for entrepreneurs to bring it companies, Flagship began creating companies itself.
Can entrepreneurship itself become a repeatable process?
The Harvard Business School case study describes Flagship as fundamentally different from a conventional venture capital firm. It created and financed ventures around science and intellectual property developed through its own organization and described itself as a "fully integrated life sciences innovation enterprise."
Flagship did not simply invest in other people's ideas. It generated its own.
The firm built an internal process called Explorations, in which small teams of scientists and business thinkers would investigate open-ended scientific questions without any predetermined commercial objective. These explorations were designed to produce unexpected insights, and when an insight showed promise, Flagship would build a company around it—providing management, capital, and operational infrastructure from the beginning.
This process produced Moderna, which became one of the most valuable biotechnology companies in the world.
But Moderna was not an outlier. Flagship's approach produced dozens of companies across therapeutics, agriculture, and sustainability, many of which reached significant scale.
What made Flagship different was not simply that it had access to capital or talent. What made it different was its commitment to a systematic, repeatable process for creating new companies—one that combined deep scientific exploration with entrepreneurial execution.
Healthcare Shares was designed with a similar ambition.
Like Flagship, Healthcare Shares does not simply invest in companies founded by others. It creates new ventures from within its own ecosystem—combining clinical insight, operational expertise, and capital to build companies that address real problems in healthcare delivery.
Like Flagship, Healthcare Shares has developed a structured process for generating new ideas and turning them into companies.
