Building Moonshots

WAY 38Leverage Knowledge Discrepancies: Applying winning approaches from other fields may offer your moonshot a shortcut.

About the Way

A romantic notion of moonshots persists that they are far‐out fantasies or require scientific breakthroughs from scratch. The fallacy is to reinvent or repeat what others have already learned before you because the knowledge just happens to be outside your sphere. In reality, moonshot teams can make a radical change simply by adopting a known approach or technology in a totally different way, often from another field or discipline. Before you fund—or seek financing for—a crazy moonshot from ground zero, consider how you could cross over proven solutions from outside your field to your moonshot. Research validates this lateral thinking, a term first coined by creative thinking guru Edward de Bono. A growing set of studies about corporate innovation find that the best ideas can come from outside an industry or field. As a trio of business professors note, “Bringing in ideas from analogous fields turns out to be a potential source of radical innovation.”¹

How do you know what makes a winning solution? These solutions are often widely adopted, considered an industry standard, or dominate that community's practice, which result in low costs, more availability, and increased suppliers. As a quick example, consider the original idea behind transportation platform Uber, which applied a mainstream practice of mobile ordering to taxi bookings. Mobile ...