Building Moonshots

WAY 4Fund for Breakthroughs: Funding breakthrough ideas, inventions, and innovation requires you to adopt opportunistic financing methods.

About the Way

Pursuing moonshots also requires financing moonshots. Often, organizations funding incremental innovation—solutions that sit comfortably near horizon 2, even arguably 2.5 (see Way 2: Start from the Almost Impossible)—will not achieve any breakthrough innovation or moonshot ability because they are not financing at the right level. In other words, groups must fully commit to funding high‐risk and high‐reward opportunities because these opportunities will provide big enough milestones to achieve meaningful progress. Breakthroughs can be described as technological miracles, something that “seems impossible given our current technological and scientific vantage” as Bill Gates says.¹ So if you keep planting seeds for small potatoes, then you will not harvest large potatoes—and more important, you won't discover the breakthrough farming technique that changes your entire crop yield.

At its simplest, financing moonshots is composed of milestones and sources. Milestones provide reference points along the critical path of development. A moonshot team will have milestones specific to their idea, which pertain to the idea's progress, the amount of funds raised by certain points, how many staff members are hired by when, and such. By contrast, a government agency funding a new program or lab would have another set of milestones. Financial ...