Innovation #12 - Moonshots
They Work Even If They Fail
A few days ago, I came across Wicked Acceleration Labs on Hacker News. They bill themselves as tackling “wicked problems”, defined as significant systemic problems that are complex, multi variable, often future-looking, ecosystem-related problems. Such problems are not as straightforward to solve as “simple” customer-centric problems. Hence they are difficult or impossible to tackle with the more customer-centric tools like Design Thinking or Lean Startup (and others) that we generally use for more immediate innovation.
When I did innovation consulting, we called these sorts of problems Holy Grails. They were the tough problems that the industry would give its eye teeth to solve, but so far were going unsolved. Impossible, intractable, unsolvable - those are the sort of words you’d hear about this class of problem. As a result, they are rarely addressed head on.
But addressing them is exactly what a Moonshot does! And for an innovative organization, there are two reasons why a Moonshot will always be a good idea.
It might succeed!
Even if it fails to reach the Moon, it will produce either tangible spinoff successes or advance your ability to reach the Moon the next time.
Why might it succeed?
Sometimes a wicked problem gets passed down over generations in an industry together with the assumption that it IS impossible to solve. That anchoring effect sets people in the exact wrong frame of mind to solve it. “OK, we’ll try, but we know no one has been able to solve it and we don’t really see any hope of solving it. But (big sigh), we’ll try.”
Yet, knowledge, technologies, markets, and frames of reference all change over generations, which means that your probability for a Moonshot success is not static. My experience is that once-impossible problems can (at least sometimes) be solved. I have seen it happen - actually I have participated on a team that differentiated a “impossible to differentiate” product line that then took the market by storm.
How might it fail, but throw off good tangential results?
As NASA’s Spinoff publication writes, “All together, since our first edition, we’ve shared the stories of more 2,000 products and services that began as, or have benefited from, NASA technology.” True, some of the inventions that are attributed to NASA (like Tang, Velcro, and Teflon, which NASA merely used) are myths, but many more inventions were born from the research efforts of NASA’s literal Moonshots (and more).
Immediate (sometimes incremental) innovation builds on existing knowledge. By extending the knowledge base around a product or technology, even if your Moonshot itself fails, you add more knowledge to make it more probable for future innovators to be successful.
So, don’t be shy - let ‘er fly!