Building Moonshots

WAY 50Play to Your Advantage: Being first, fast, or last is a deliberate decision in an innovation race.

About the Way

When pursuing game‐changing opportunities, you don't always need to be first to market, or even second. The position your organization chooses to pursue should be based on your experience and a strategy that you control—with tactics that play to your abilities today and the abilities you will build across the innovation journey. In other words, make a deliberate decision to be first, fast, or last because the race to a moonshot is often a marathon, not sprint.

Too many teams fall prey to “the one best strategy” that they discovered in business school, heard on a podcast, or read somewhere. Instead, a team should consider all the paths that could create a long‐term competitive advantage. In moonshot innovation, simply being the first to market may not be the best move for a company with decades of experience delivering solutions to mainstream customers. Likewise, a team whose experience is delivering “the best solution at the best price” is also ill‐suited to chasing the early adopters.

There are parallel examples about sports teams choosing their best advantage. For example, the two teams who made it to America's Super Bowl annual championship game in 2022 had “opposite blueprints” for achieving their exemplary position. One American newspaper described the situation:

Every year, the Super Bowl is a case study for the other 30 NFL [National Football League] ...