The original Moonshot
In Sept 1962, United States President, John F. Kennedy, made a simple but wildly bold statement (moonshots) to the American people – “We choose to go to the moon in this decade.” He inspired a generation to believe that the unthinkable was possible. 7 years later, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 on the moon.
Moonshot Thinking
Moonshot thinking was defined by Google´s Astro Teller, founder of Alphabet X (formerly Google X). Instead on innovate by making incremental improvements (10%), when you use moonshot thinking, you envision what a much larger (10x or ten times) improvement might look like, or solve it altogether. So moonshot thinking requires critical thinking to find radical solutions to global challenges.
10% vs. 10x
When you are focusing your team to find a 10x solution, you are basically requesting them to step aside of a linear way of thinking (10%) by re-framing the way they look at the problem. However, that is scary. Big companies are under a constant pressure to deliver value by improving what is working now, so they are drived and invested to make 10% improvements, while start-ups envision radical solutions that mat reshape an entire market, build a new one in their way or render obsolete the existing one, where those big companies felt comfortable operating within.
Then, for a moonshot to happen the solution must fall in the intersection of this three areas:
1. A huge problem in the world that affects millions or billions of people.
2. A radical, sci-fi sounding solution that may sound impossible today.
3. A technology breakthrough that gives us a glimmer of hope that the solution could be possible in the next 5-10 years .
More about Moonshots
Astro Teller, ‘Captain of Moonshots’ at Alphabet’s X, Is on a Roll.