Building Moonshots

WAY 42Fund the Handoffs: Focusing on the transitions from concept to solution speeds the process.

About the Way

Many amazing ideas are lost in common gaps. In the startup space, there is a well‐known “valley of death” that describes the fraught period when a team is fast burning investment funds in order to get to reoccurring revenue. (SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son even introduced the “valley of the coronavirus” concept in 2020, describing the challenges of overcoming the pandemic's impact on his company's investments.¹) Similarly, organizational silos are created by department, specialization, or even location, so handoffs between these internal groups are seldom seamless. The situation is exacerbated across an industry or ecosystem because most funding entities are structured by idea stage or technology level. Within the US government, there is even an official Department of Defense term called the color of money, which describes specific purchasing categories, such as “operations and maintenance,” that influence how federal employees set up and fund programs to fit only within a particular category versus spanning categories.

Any moonshot will need to survive multiple gaps and valleys as it crosses various development stages. Certain groups have encountered unexpected gaps in the broader national innovation ecosystem. One group experiencing a gap in the United States is the Pentagon's innovation agency DARPA, tasked with creating breakthrough technologies and capabilities ...