Building Moonshots

Introduction

This book focuses on how the world moves forward in huge leaps, built by the hard work of visionary teams. From our backyard of Silicon Valley to our time spent working with pioneering organizations in the world's innovation ecosystems—pick your list, and we will introduce you to an amazing team there—we have had a front seat into the many ways to imagine, invent, and deliver a radically better future. We have taught at the world's leading research universities and business schools, huddled with young teams pursuing outsized visions, and advised teams and leaders across the Global 1000 and six continents. Across all this work since the 1990s, the same questions keep surfacing, which we can shorthand as: are there proven ways to do this?

Moonshots are a class of innovation that drives humanity forward. We realized there is a need to collect the stories, share the examples we use regularly, and capture the questions that teams should ask themselves, all in their pursuit of how to build moonshots. In our goal to explain the how‐to to teams, we realized it wasn't just a quick list of the best practices or a double‐clickable process to follow. There is not one canvas for these types of radical ideas. Instead, there are numerous ways that have proved successful across different types of organizations seeking to go big, some of which relate to adopting a moonshot mindset, inventing what does not yet exist, and making the big bets. Which led us to 50+ ways for building ...