In January Google ended Project Titan, an initiative to blanket the earth in Wi-Fi with the help of solar-powered drones. It was the latest in a series of Google’s moonshot projects being closed. With the announcement, some in the media concluded that the Google moonshot was essentially dead.
What Your Moonshot Can Learn from the Apollo Program
Moonshots is a term favored by X, the exploratory arm of Google Alphabet, who state on their website, “our mission is to invent and launch “moonshot” technologies that we hope could someday make the world a radically better place.” The notion of moonshots is a hugely appealing idea, whether you are an enterprise working on a market innovation, a nonprofit organization tackling societal problems, or a government trying to govern better. Whatever our sector or focus, we need to be able to think big and execute on those ideas successfully, otherwise we are stuck making incremental advances. But moonshots are high cost and high risk, as their name suggests. They seem to be a special domain reserved for super humans and misguided optimists. How can we get the formula for moonshots right, to unlock this approach to groundbreaking innovation? And how can your company get it right if Google itself can’t seem to make their moonshot factory work? For starters, maybe we can learn something by looking at how the original NASA moonshot worked.