He has five lifetime achievement awards and countless honors and distinctions. He launched 17 companies, sold nine for almost $8 billion and took two public. He has funded research at the University of Southern California, Purdue University and Israel's Technion to the tune of several hundred million dollars. His innovations are saving lives every day. He is wealthy beyond imagination.

But at 86, Alfred E. Mann is nowhere near ready to call it quits.

The serial entrepreneur and philanthropist is still working 70 hours a week and only now is he ready to admit that running eight companies may be a bit much. He would like to scale back, he says, to say 50 hours a week and relax a bit more--maybe even take a vacation

But even as he contemplates cutting back on his commitments, the man who helped power spacecraft in the 1960s, who created the pacemaker and insulin pump, and whose innovations are helping, in his words "the deaf to hear; the blind to see and the lame to walk," has one more pressing thing to do: to finalize and bring to market an inhaled form of insulin.

Working on that is Valencia-based MannKind Corp., which Mann calls his biggest priority--as well as his biggest headache--right now The inhaled insulin, Afrezza, promises to eliminate some of the dangers that accompany today's insulin therapies, namely that they don't respond fast enough to glucose and take too long to dissipate after a meal, causing blood sugar to drop dangerously low.

Trying to get FDA approval for Afrezza has cost more than $2 billion and taken 14 years so far--longer than Mann ever imagined. To fund it, MannKind has had to jettison other promising projects, including some cancer therapies. But if there is one more thing Mann still wants to do, it is to see Afrezza through to final approval.

"Diabetes is the greatest challenge to health care in the world today," he said "If we don't find a solution, it will be disastrous."

Mann is confident Afrezza will get the green light sometime within two years. But he is also baffled by how long it's taking and the cost. He says "innovation is in trouble" because companies and regulators alike are too risk-averse. The cost in terms of life-saving products that are not getting to market is very high.

"We have to understand," he says, "that progress requires innovation and innovation involves risk"

Question: You have founded 17 companies in your lifetime and you are wealthy beyond imagination. What motivates you to keep going?

Answer: In my early career, one of my first companies provided solar power systems for most of the free world's spacecraft. One of my customers was the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which came to me in 1969 and asked if I'd be willing to develop a cardiac pacemaker that would last more than 18 to 20 months. Pacemakers were quite large back then and did not last very long. The goal was to...