Who We Are
The disruption wing of the Department of Energy (DOE). First. Fast. Ambitious. We’re an agency of energy scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and industry visionaries who dare to disrupt the status quo.

When you operate at the frontier edge, governments often want proof that you are still worth funding. ARPA-E was reviewed in 2017 and just received its second checkup from the US government – which couldn’t be ducked because Congress built the review requirement directly into law. And there were real teeth behind it: the legislation specified the report could include a recommendation on whether ARPA-E should be continued or terminated, along with a description of lessons learned that might apply to other government programs.

Why should H4 fans care

If you spend your days living at the edge – in H3 experiments or H4 visions in the “almost impossible” end (and yes, Tamara has loved using en dashes long before ChatGPT made it trendy) – ARPA-E is an important role model to know and watch.

In 2005, a National Academies report entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm rocked the American R&D community. The report laid out major proposals to improve American energy security and economic competitiveness, including establishing a new agency for energy modeled after the highly successful DARPA (see more on the ARPA Model here). ARPA-E eventually became real by 2009 (those curious can read Tamara’s interview with Eric Toone for part of its origin story). ARPA-E sits within the US Department of Energy and funds high-risk, high-payoff R&D aimed at advanced energy tech.

ARPA-E has had major impact over its last 17 years. Through 2021, ARPA-E had put roughly US $2.9 billion into over 1,270 projects according to its tracking. By FY2022, ARPA-E informed Congress that 131 new companies had spun out, 289 patent licenses had been reported, 281 projects had partnered with other federal agencies, and 200 project teams had pulled in more than $11 billion in private follow-on funding. You might recognize some of these top projects in the news, among others:

• Fervo Energy, an advanced geothermal company incubated at Stanford and Berkeley Lab before ARPA-E backing in 2021, now with a power purchase deal with Shell; and

• Sila Nanotechnologies, a battery materials company that raised $375 million and is building out production with Mercedes-Benz.

On fusion specifically, ARPA-E’s investments have attracted more than $1.5 billion in private follow-on money, prompting the agency’s director Conner Prochaska to say:

Private capital scales what it can already see; ARPA-E funds what the market can’t yet price or predict. Venture capital funds companies to build a product, not to solve the fundamental science challenges needed to reach those milestones.

All in all, this is a pretty good hit rate for an agency whose entire premise is betting on things many others consider too early or too edgy.

Why do this scoring again

This isn’t ARPA-E’s first exam though. The National Academies did its first thorough review in 2017, finding that the agency was on track and noting:

…it cannot reasonably be expected to have completely fulfilled those goals given so few years of operation and the size of its budget. Importantly, especially at this early stage, the committee found no signs that ARPA-E is failing, or on a path to failing, to deliver on its mission and goals.

Doesn’t that statement seem like a backhanded compliment? Then with the Energy Act of 2020, Congress mandated a second evaluation of ARPA-E, which was released publicly this month by the National Academies. A major reason is that the agency goals were expanded considerably. On top of its three original goals to reduce energy imports, cut emissions, and increase efficiency, ARPA-E gained two more goals: to develop new technologies to improve the management and disposal of radioactive wastes and enhance the resilience, reliability, and security of energy infrastructure – concerns that were top of mind then (and now).

Beyond more funding, having more mandated goals meant more procedures, more workload, and more staff needed. So of course, Congress wanted to know ARPA-E was still on a path to success (or path to not fail).

Our report of the report

Overall, we feel that the latest assessment of ARPA-E was thoughtfully done. The 2026 committee chair is a law professor at Arizona State, specializing in emerging tech governance. Nearly two-thirds of the 16 committee members are from universities. Although our first inclination was to roll our eyes at a usual heavy academic bias, on closer inspection, several of these experts had additional experience outside the ivory tower. And the non-academic members brought operational knowledge of commercialization, manufacturing, and/or investing – all of which brought deeper nuance to the report’s recommendations.

The report’s upshot was that Congress should continue to fund ARPA-E because “it plays a unique and valuable role in the nation’s energy innovation ecosystem.”

Unique and valuable are important words in our view. In a 2024 hearing on the agency, Congressman Frank Lucas stated that, “What makes ARPA-E so unique within DOE is that the program focuses on energy technologies that are too early stage or too high risk to attract private sector investment.” Referring to the Fervo Energy project as an example, he added:

These are the kind of ARPA-E projects that unlock previously unthought of pathways for the entire industry. As the saying goes: a rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s exactly what ARPA-E can do for large segments of our domestic energy industry.

And how valuable? We see this value manifesting in two major ways: in what gets funded and helping big bets attract more funds as they start to prove out. First, the report points out that ARPA-E’s role in energy innovation has changed over time to better meet US goals in energy security. For example, in the mid-2000s, the focus was on reducing the nation’s reliance on oil and gas imports, and now, the focus has shifted to reducing reliance on critical mineral imports. The agency’s funding priorities likewise shift.

Second, the agency’s involvement helps de-risk new energy technologies. The report found that companies selected for an ARPA-E award see significantly increased patents and follow-on funding in the years after the award, compared with those who applied but were not selected. In other words, ARPA-E’s support was a positive signal to reassure later-stage investors and partners. One big recommendation from the authors was that Congress should triple the funding for ARPA-E’s SCALEUP program because very few sources fund the commercialization “valley of death” going from early prototype (aka, FOAK) into scalable development (NOAK).

While measuring moonshot success is tricky, notably at the fuzzy front end of innovation, ARPA-E knows output metrics matter to policymakers. The report further notes that 30 percent of ARPA-E awards have at least 1 granted patent, and patents linked to ARPA-E are slightly more novel than those without ARPA-E involvement.

Addressing the missing TRL 0

The National Academies report reminds us that multiple valleys of death exist in energy funding, and it features an informative diagram overlaid across the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), reproduced here:

Their diagram includes the critical handoff from TRL into MRL (Market Readiness Levels), shown by the yellow and orange arrows at the bottom of the diagram. Recognizing this handoff impressed us. Arguably, ARPA-E sits at TRL 2–4, funding breakthrough ideas and early-stage research, and its SCALEUP program bridges through TRL 5 (or 5.5 arguably). Experts don’t fully agree on the exact band.

Yet the report missed a chance to show TRL 0, a formative time of imagination and envisioning at the start of the moonshot pipeline. We’ve written before on TRL 0 – everything that happens before TRL 1 that includes the wandering, the half-baked hallway conversations, and what-if prompts. To be fair, the committee chair was gracious to point out to me that part of the report largely described what ARPA-E has funded historically, and he reminded me that elsewhere in the report they called for more emphasis on “more far out, imaginative ideas to be raised and discussed.”

In this light, if the agency is serious about finding program directors who are “visionaries who dare to disrupt the status quo,” then highlighting TRL 0 embodies this early mindset. This fits another big recommendation from the authors for ARPA-E to improve its talent recruitment. We agree with the authors that:

ARPA-E’s effectiveness depends on its distinctive culture, which attracts talented experts who think “outside the box.”

Moreover, TRL 0 is more than basic scientific curiosity. From an institutional stance, ARPA-E embodies the boldness to expand the edges of the energy frontier and “the freedom to find out”. What counts as energy research and the playing field of new energy technologies? Who provokes the imagination for the researchers – some of whom will later join ARPA-E?

Broadly speaking, from the mid to late 2000s, ARPA-E itself was an untested hypothesis that the DARPA model could transplant from defense to energy. In this sense, ARPA-E spent its first years at TRL 1–2. The 2017 National Academies assessment was effectively the first proof-of-concept test of that institutional hypothesis, and the 2026 report is a second data point confirming that it still holds.

As a final side note, we love that ARPA-E describes its targeting method as “white spaces.” These are gaps where no government or private funding exists at a given TRL or capabilities sitting just past the current technical frontier. This reminds us of our White Spots tool, which longtime readers will recognize from our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation.

Tell us what you think about ARPA-E. Read more in the new report here.

Written with input from William R. Cockayne

Reach us any time at hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

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Moonshots deserve big and bold numbers

By their lofty nature, moonshots seem to thwart quantification. However, not only is it possible to add numbers to moonshots, we recommend that your team do so. Big ideas deserve big numbers. In our Building Moonshots book, Moonshot Way 22 states Adopt Bold Metrics. We explain how using big numbers helps to convey the ambition and scale, even audacity, of a radical vision.

In the book, we highlight a visionary effort by our dear friend Fred Swaniker. Since 2014, Swaniker has led a massive vision for turning the rising generation of youth across Africa into ethical and entrepreneurial leaders. While there is a strong moral imperative and clear emotional appeal to his team’s vision, Swaniker has deliberately used big numbers to further demonstrate the scale and urgency. He states:

We are developing 3 million leaders who are a catalyst for the transformation of Africa.

Let’s put that 3 million number in perspective. Swaniker completed his MBA at Stanford University, which awarded 2,140 bachelor’s degrees in June 2025. In fact, this is the largest graduating class to date in the university’s history. (As a side note, we both earned our doctorate degrees from Stanford, though we happened to meet Swaniker by chance in South Africa and not on campus!) Assuming a similar graduation rate, it would take Stanford over a thousand years – 1,402 years specifically – to graduate 3 million leaders. African nations do not have this luxury of time, so they must think in moonshot numbers.

When he has fundraised or given a talk, Swaniker has placed the target number of 3 million leaders against a timeline. From a key milestone in 2018, he realized it would take 17 years to reach the year 2035. Moonshot journeys often require the long view and take extra time to truly achieve. Instead of saying 17 years though, he gives a countdown of 6,000 days to 2035. By using days, Swaniker helps others realize the pressing need to achieve his big vision. This number creates a bolder versus bigger statement. A day is a familiar and more immediate unit of time. A day feels more precise, more concrete, and even more impactful. You can measure effort by days, when every day matters.

Moreover, Swaniker helps put his vision in context by using numbers again. He has reminded others that Africa will have the largest workforce in the world by 2035 due to population gains. And unless the current employment trajectory changes, nearly half of Africans will be unemployed. Preferably, this continental workforce will be educated, skilled, and empowered before 2035. Yet leadership learning and development require time via formal education or other programs. So Swaniker’s number in market size helps show the global value of his vision and further reinforces the urgency to act now.

Match growth measures by innovation horizon

Using big and bold numbers is one way to show measures of progress. Your team should also consider appropriate measures by horizon. We have discussed the Four Horizons model before, especially for anchoring Horizon 4 (H4) with a moonshot or vision.

Chinese technology manufacturer Lenovo is a US$45 billion Fortune 500 company and offers a fantastic example for tracking metrics by horizon. (We have highlighted Lenovo in our Inventing the Almost Impossible book too.) In 2017, Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing presented Lenovo’s vision, firmly anchoring their H4 – and going beyond hardware:

The vision for our future is very clear. In this Smart Internet era, Lenovo will provide smart devices that integrate applications, services and the best user experience, as well as robust cloud infrastructure to make life easier and better, and work more productive and efficient.

Lenovo then introduced its Three-Wave Strategy to achieve this vision. Each wave has a distinct business focus, corresponding nicely with horizons 1-3 in the Four Horizons model:

• Wave 1: Maintain Lenovo’s leading position in the PC market.

• Wave 2: Build mobile services and data center operations as new growth engines.

• Wave 3: Invest in “device + cloud” and “device (infrastructure) + cloud” opportunities.

Within a year, this stacked strategy was already credited for driving strong revenue growth for the company. Lenovo soon simplified its vision to “Become the leader and enabler of Intelligent Transformation” through the combination of Smart IoT, Smart Infrastructure, and Smart Vertical solutions. The company also sharpened its communication to emphasize a single power word per wave: DEFEND | BUILD | INVEST.

Here is Lenovo’s Three-Wave Strategy overlaid on our Four Horizons model, with representative success metrics along the bottom of the diagram:

Lenovo continually updated its success metrics via quarterly shareholder calls, ongoing news releases, and annual reports, so you can follow their progress over multiple years. The company reinforces that each horizon deserves a different category of success metric, as follows:

• Horizon (Wave) 1 metrics emphasize near-term operations and output. Lenovo relies on standard metrics showing growing market share, total shipments and sales, and increasing profit margins that defend its market leadership in various product categories.

• Horizon (Wave) 2 metrics focus on mid-term growth efforts. Lenovo’s metrics demonstrate emerging business growth by highlighting initial profitability by new product category, business unit, and geography.

• Horizon (Wave) 3 metrics address long-term perspective and early experimental potential. H3 metrics for Lenovo underscore its emerging mindshare in new areas of investment, so these metrics spotlight new product design awards, positive conference coverage, and favorite consumer concepts.

A wonderful example of H3 proof is Lenovo’s Star Wars Jedi Challenge AR headset, an immersive experience with Lightsaber controllers. In late 2018, Lenovo highlighted this prototype as a clear #1 consumer device in augmented reality for the holiday season. Although this headset would clearly not be a major product line for the company, its popularity showed that Lenovo understood user need, could create product delight, work with major brand owners like Disney (who owns Star Wars), and apply cutting-edge technology in playful ways.

In its public materials, Lenovo does not explain what metrics the company has used to validate the strong vision that anchors its Horizon 4. From experience, we expect these early metrics emerged during the company’s vision-setting process that led to Lenovo’s Three-Wave Strategy.

• Horizon 4 metrics confirm vision fit and inspiration, serving as more qualitative than quantitative check points. Typical H4 metrics validate story stickiness, initial engagement among team members and early customers, and signs of community understanding.

A helpful metaphor of forests, plants, and seeds

We have a helpful metaphor to put the value of moonshot efforts in context. Tamara loves a comment that the former CEO of Swiss tech company Logitech made to describe the company’s innovation process. In a media interview, Bracken Darrell said, “We have a process we call trees, plants, and seeds.”

This organic metaphor aptly describes the first three horizons in our Four Horizons model. Trees represent established business with deep roots in H1, plants offer growth potential to become new fields and cash crops in H2, and new types of seeds and cultivation techniques describe H3 activities.

By applying this metaphor across the Four Horizons, you can see how different stages of growth require different metrics. Frankly, how you measure a healthy tree or forest in H1 should be a different KPI versus seed potential in H3. For farmers, they might track canopy density for forests versus root health for plants versus germination rate for seeds.

That said, some elements of innovation lie outside the confines of the spreadsheet. As the saying goes, “Not everything that matters can be measured; not everything that we can measure matters.” Try to avoid the trap of measuring what seems easy or obvious. Don’t just count the number of sheep at night but consider the quality of sleep – and what dream(s) you continue to return to. A moonshot offers a big shared dream for a group, and the value is as much achieving the outsized impact as creating the bold possibility in the first place.

What metrics have you found most (or least) useful when showing moonshot success?

Reach us any time at hello@buildingmoonshots.com. (Tamara reads every email.)

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What defines the ARPA Model

The ARPA Model describes an organizational approach to high risk, high reward innovation, modeled after US government agency DARPA as the original mold. The ARPA Model is generally characterized by the following dimensions:

• Vision first: The focus starts with a vision of new technologies, then on developing a research program structured around ambitious projects to achieve that vision.

• PM autonomy: The group is typically staffed by program managers (PMs) who have considerable authority to define goals, allocate resources, and select teams.

• Flat decision making: While others may provide input, program approval ultimately rests on the group’s director, not peer review or committee decision.

• Rapid timelines: PMs work on short contracts (3-4 years), so programs are typically run on tight schedules and a sense of urgency where work is done by outside “performers” who deliver proof-of-concepts or prototypes at major milestones.

• Collaborative ecosystem: Funding and idea sourcing is spread across a diverse mix of university groups, companies, startups, and government labs, thus increasing the capacity and variety of possible solutions.

Compared to classic R&D, the ARPA Model has a much more lightweight and action-oriented structure, as shown in the following table.

Our colleagues in Europe are particularly fascinated by DARPA and its iconic ARPA Model. Just take the recent calls from the European Commission, Nature journal editors, and think tanks like Think Tank EUROPA. Even president Michiel Scheffer of the European Innovation Council (EIC) has frequently declared his group wants to become more like a “US-style ARPA.” Yet despite their insistence, they seem to be rather prissy about it. (It’s like watching Tamara declare she’s committed to the Nordic icy plunge while staying ankle deep.)

Two giant background drivers in the ARPA Model

Less mentioned are two massive drivers that underpin the ARPA Model’s success, each derived from DARPA. Since these drivers often work in the background, they are easily assumed or overlooked, yet they are critical in moving the overall trajectory of the entire organization.

One background driver are the end users. Specifically, DARPA has a large internal market serving the US military services, which provides a steady demand of end users with a sizable budget and ongoing tech needs. Certain groups that have adopted the ARPA Model like ARPA-E (for energy) have had to rethink their setup because they did not have the same market lock-in.

A second background driver is culture. DARPA relies on deeply held cultural practices and beliefs. One profound belief is the concept of DARPA Hard that PMs use to set a high bar for the visions they pursue. MIT scholar William Bonvillian, who has long studied DARPA and ARPA-E, observed years ago that:

DARPA is widely understood to embody a series of unique tacit rules implemented at the ‘street level’ by its program managers, that reflect the organizing principles of its culture, and these are not typical of similar such rules at other R&D agencies.

Lighting the ARPA fire in Europe

The European Commission sees the EIC as Europe’s version of ARPA, and Scheffer knows EIC lacks this same defense pull in Europe. The EIC must instead cater to a mixed bag of EU member nations – and mostly outside of defense interests. While some might argue that NATO DIANA is trying to take an ARPA approach with NATO as its main defense customer, the DIANA unit is still finding its feet. And in our view, DIANA’s investing aims are more akin to accelerating tech adoption like the US Defense Intelligence Unit than the true radical efforts of DARPA.

So how close is the EIC in actually fostering an ARPA-like culture? We discussed EIC’s promising commitment to hire more visionary PMs (granted, only six but you need to start somewhere) in our last newsletter. Moreover, the agency has announced that it is piloting a new funding model with faster reviews in 2026, so that’s also encouraging.

Except Scheffer has said that Europe should stop referring to the ARPA approach at a science policy event in October, adding that a European solution may “only look 50% like an ARPA.”

Fifty percent also means half-baked. Bluntly, looking like ARPA is not the same as being ARPA. Not every organization is ready to be radical. Although the European Commission published a set of moonshots as part of the EU’s long-term budget (2028-2034) a few months ago, these were largely intended as inspirational examples:

Additionally, Horizon Europe, tightly connected to the European Competitiveness Fund, will have the capacity to develop ‘moonshot projects’. These projects would move from research to demonstration and real-world deployment. They would be supported by pooled funding from EU (Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund), national, public, and private sources. Designed to position Europe as a global leader in strategic fields, these moonshot projects would drive progress in areas such as [emphasis added]:

• the future circular collider

• clean aviation

• quantum computing

• next-generation AI

• data sovereignty

• automated transport and mobility

• regenerative therapies

• fusion energy

• space economy

• zero water pollution and

• ocean observation

If the European Commission is serious, then it must embrace what it means to create a distinctly European version of ARPA. This means going back to basics. The ARPA Model is focused solely on finding and funding breakthroughs. The EIC should consider not trying to do everything across multiple market segments – which cause conflicting innovation horizons, incentives, and metrics for funding breakthroughs to supporting startups to pushing scaleup programs. Or maybe EIC is not the best organizational unit to wear an ARPA mantle in Europe at this time, which could fit another group better.

The ARPA Model is more than innovation challenges

As a final point, while challenges are one of several innovation mechanisms, challenges are not a defining feature of the ARPA Model.

DARPA introduced its first open challenge 20 years ago with the 2004 Grand Challenge for autonomous driving. A major goal was to reach new teams beyond the usual, often tightknit, R&D circles that DARPA knew – because different groups bring different ways to solve problems. DARPA has continued these challenges today to spur innovation and spark community, among other goals.

See the graphic below for DARPA challenges through the years. These are not run as an annual exercise, and some challenges stretch across two years.

Now consider DARPA challenges in terms of funding. This past year featured a two-year challenge called the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), which launched in 2023 and was done in collaboration with ARPA-H, a US government funding agency focused on health moonshots, alongside several industry partners. In this final year, the AIxCC prize money gave USD $8.5 million to the top three winners – not chump change by any means. Yet DARPA’s FY25 budget was USD $4.37 billion, excluding classified work. This means that this challenge represents barely 0.2 percent of DARPA’s total budget for the year (yes, you read that correctly, and for the math nerds in our audience, yes, we compared calendar year to fiscal year, but you get our point nonetheless).

So while an important tool for DARPA outreach and community building (really, community creating), challenges are not an essential aspect of the ARPA Model. Yet multiple European groups are relying on challenges to signal ARPA spirit. For example, Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, generally known as SPRIN-D, recently announced:

We kick-off Next Frontier AI by running a SPRIND Challenge – a competitive DARPA-style, outcome-driven program – but scaled up in budget, ambition and international scope. With short proposals, no bullshit bureaucracy and funding within a few weeks, SPRIND Challenges are engineered to boost top innovators, not slow them down. [emphasis added]

Even the EIC has similar game plans, announcing it will “pilot new ‘ARPA-style’ Advanced Innovation Challenges” in 2026, with teams competing to invent new technologies.

We wish them all luck. It is wonderful that the ARPA Model can inspire other big dreamers. And when these groups are ready to get past dabbling and go all in, they have a proven blueprint to draw on – from fostering a visionary culture to building a true collaborative ecosystem.

Reach us any time at hello@buildingmoonshots.com. (Tamara reads every email.)

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📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

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Those who have a futuristic vision.

Not your standard Program Manager

Consider this job posting from DARPA – the Pentagon’s agency for high risk, high reward work – that we found published in The Economist in 2009:

Are you a scientist or engineer with a radical idea (or ideas) that you believe could provide meaningful change of lasting benefit for the U.S. military? Would you like to lead the country’s most capable academic and industrial experts to make that idea become reality in a period of just a few years? If so, you should consider joining the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a program manager.

What is a DARPA PM? A DARPA program manager is…

• An idea generator

• A technical expert

• An entrepreneur

• A visionary

• A patriot dedicated to national service

Would you apply? This job ad is unusual in that it was paid and placed in a non-military publication. The Economist is a weekly magazine covering current affairs and business news globally, where you more often see job postings for diplomats, policy wonks, and various global positions. Here was DARPA casting its net widely and broadly to find those outside its usual recruiting circles.

Now look at the job wording more closely. We love that the first line is a direct invitation to a “scientist or engineer”. DARPA relies on people with deep expertise and technical knowledge, who often live in the messy world of R&D or cutting-edge discovery, so already DARPA has clarified its target candidate.

The next part of the sentence is revealing too: “with a radical idea (or ideas).” This person should have a crazy vision, preferably even more than one, for DARPA. Moreover, the following phrase “that you could believe could provide meaningful change of lasting benefit” shows that DARPA pursues people who aim to make a real, big difference. And that they need to deliver in a tight time frame – often four years or less as a government employee.

Now jump down a few lines to what DARPA calls these people: program managers or PMs. This job title may sound generic, even mild, yet DARPA is quick to offer five other hats that the PM wears from “idea generator” to “visionary”.

These PMs bring more than money; they bring a grander sense of what could be. They find and invest in others to expand on a shared dream and make that dream possible. And from our experience, these people often bring a healthy disrespect for unnecessary procedure too.

ARPA-inspired PMs start with vision

A growing number of governments view DARPA as the gold standard. A mix of organizational elements, well documented, show why DARPA has been an enduring role model since 1958. However, groups that follow this ARPA model today often miss how the PM role really functions.

In an early study of DARPA, Tamara spoke with several dozen PMs to learn about their culture, beliefs, and practices (see her ARPA writings here). DARPA defined the PM’s responsibilities in sweeping terms in an internal job description from 2010: “Defines, develops, and communicates a vision and execution plan to incorporate technologies into [the target] program area.” The job req also stated the need for “exceptional technical ability and seasoned judgment” in a PM.

In practice, DARPA pioneered a vision, a checkbook, and a plane ticket setup in its PM role. Each PM brings a vision of a grand, even futuristic, idea; the check book is their funding support for taking a big bet, and the plane ticket signifies their willingness to get out in the field, meeting the builders and performers (i.e., the teams making the idea real) wherever they may be. Yet we don’t see these practices enough from groups who say they are serious about building moonshot capability.

American funding agencies, such as ARPA-E (the teenager) and ARPA-H (the baby), have modeled their PM role after DARPA (the grandaddy). Their PM roles continue to emphasize vision. In Europe, the European Innovation Council (EIC) announced that it is recruiting six new PMs for 2026 to shape Europe’s portfolio of high-potential projects. We are glad to see the spirit of the ARPA model captured in the latest EIC description, which places the ability of “developing visions” at the forefront:

EIC Programme Managers are responsible for developing visions for technological and innovation breakthroughs, the active management of portfolios of EIC funded projects to support these visions, and bringing together stakeholders to put these visions into reality.

Other agencies worldwide, like KARPA (in South Korea) and SPRIN-D (Germany), are still finding their footing and talent focus.

How Alphabet’s X finds category-creating PMs in industry

Companies also seek visionary program managers. Take Alphabet’s X, The Moonshot Factory, which has an ARPA-like sensibility aiming to “bring sci-fi ideas into reality to help solve some of the world’s hardest problems.” Although X is not directly built on the ARPA model, this business unit seeks similar moonshot results.

Over the years, X has advertised jobs online with unusual titles. X’s Pathfinder Firestarter role was defined by “How You Will Make 10x Impact”, and job responsibilities included:

• Generate moonshot scale ideas from external and internal sources

• Craft the strategic vision and learning plan to de-risk the technical, commercial, and product aspects of the idea

• Be audacious, take initiative, and creative while remaining humble and supportive of teammates

Obvious know-how, right?

Similarly, the Moonshot and Technology Prospector job at X expected a candidate to “Select, advocate for and manage the execution of promising outsourced directed research and present proposals internally to gather talent and support.” A preferred job qualification was “experience in intersectional and lateral thinking” too.

Turning imagination into action

The announcement of the new EIC PMs was refreshing because we recently met with a government director leading a new groundbreaking effort for his nation, a wonderful person who was the opposite of a DARPA PM. He was a “lifer” employee, stuck in endless office meetings, with no strong vision yet for his program – or the realization to step forward and enlist friendly help to co-develop the missing vision and related ecosystem. Partly because… we could go on.

The point is that visionary PMs start with imagination and then work to turn that imagination into action. This focus on vision is essential in developing the kind of ecosystem needed to deliver radical innovation. These visionary PMs stand alongside ambitious researchers who deliver experimental results, alongside inventive engineers whose tinkering turns those results into scalable solutions, and alongside technically-savvy entrepreneurs and product managers who define and build new markets for those new solutions.

PMs are prime movers who spark the process.

Understanding the true nature of the visionary PM role raises all sorts of other considerations. Such as, where can groups find people with these wild abilities? Can older “operators” develop a moonshot mindset and capability? And why aren’t we teaching more of these skills in high school – or frankly, even earlier to teenagers?

Let us know which specific topic or angle you wish to hear more on, as this thread is always top of mind for us!

Reach us any time at hello@buildingmoonshots.com. (Tamara reads every email.)

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

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Or are you hearing endless doom and gloom? Movies, books, and news articles are rife with negative stories, and social media thrives on doomscrolling.

The danger is that negative thinking reinforces itself. When we only see the dark side of things, we become prone to expect the worst or oversimplify the situation, seeing things as only good or only bad. We become less able to see the bigger picture, less willing to consider new options, and less open to trying new things. In other words, we stop thinking things can genuinely change for the better. All ages get stuck in narrow tracks.

Yet we can counter this darkness ahead with light. We need more optimism, and moonshots are a way to show bold scenarios of futures we really want to happen.

We have a personal connection to utopias

Beyond our work on moonshots, we are personally connected to a utopian mindset.

Bill’s last name is a direct reference to the myth of Cockaigne, an imaginary paradise of ultimate luxury and ease that appears in many medieval poems and stories. These accounts describe rivers of wine, houses built of cake, and perfectly mild weather. The land showed a dream where food was plentiful, no work was expected, and everyone enjoyed life regardless of wealth or status.

And this dream spread: “Cocagne” in France became “Cokaygne” in Britain, “Cuccagna” or “Bengodi” in Italy, “Jauja” in Spain, “Schlaraffenlan” in Germany, and more. Later in American folklore, Big Rock Candy Mountain expressed the same sentiments from a hobo’s view.

Similarly in her work, Tamara explored the concept of abundance during a fellowship with the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation years ago. She considered what abundance could mean for the American business community, and what a future of national innovation might entail related to abundance.

Moreover, she has taken these beliefs forward, currently holding a UNESCO Chair of Anticipatory Leadership for Innovative and Better Futures – and this last part in italics was an important aspect to UNESCO. For Tamara, so much of anticipatory leadership goes beyond foresight to the raw capacity of imagination.

An abundant outlook dares to imagine a better world

Abundance continues to be a rallying motif. In 2012, XPRIZE Foundation founder Peter Diamandis and science journalist Steven Kotler wrote the book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. While technocentric, they give multiple reasons to be optimistic about humanity’s future.

And earlier this year, writer Ezra Klein considered the value of abundance with Derek Thompson in their book entitled Abundance. They make the case for the politics of the plenty (and then argue that the United States should step up and pave the way to progress). More to our points, this book drew on an earlier piece by Klein in 2023 about how “the dystopia we fear is keeping us from the utopia we deserve”.

Because utopias are useful – and needed more than ever. As author Jonny Thomson points out:

Utopian thinking comes from many political directions, and this is a good thing — it is the impetus that pushes society forward... Utopianism is the bold and brave voice that challenges the status quo. The act of questioning brings about change. Utopianism is what dares to imagine a world that could be better.

Abundance emphasizes ample resources and boundless opportunities. An abundant outlook naturally aligns with utopian thinking because both encourage imagining futures where possibilities are limitless. This outlook leads to asking “what if” (see our earlier issue on how a national funding agency has used these prompts as a way to bring the impossible into focus). Groups can envision more different types of outcomes and then explore what might happen next by hypothetically going down each path.

What groups are sharing bold visions for a better world?

Ironically, visions of abundance are not so abundant. We have found only a handful of examples showing utopian-tinged thinking – that are wildly inspiring and spilling over into other communities.

Consider the book Utopia for Realists. In 2017, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman laid out a vision for modern society based on a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek. One critic wrote in response, “You may not dream the same dreams as Bregman – but he invites you to take dreaming seriously. For that alone, this book is worth a read.”

These types of vision invite change because they show you another view of what is possible. Bregman’s vision provoked at least one group to act, who then established a foundation in Canada and tested giving free income to the homeless in Vancouver. This group found their experiment produced successful outcomes, ultimately as net savings for society.

Breman took his thinking further in his latest book Moral Ambition, which can be summarized by its subtitle Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. He writes, “After 10 years of writing, it’s time to take action.” His book propelled him to launch a School for Moral Ambition with co-founders. His explanation starts with the word imagine:

Imagine: an international movement of ambitious do-gooders who want to make the world a better place.

On the other side of the world, Japan’s Science and Technology (JST) agency has been pursuing a Moonshot R&D program across multiple ambitious goals. Moonshot Goal 10 is focused on achieving fusion energy by 2050. The group behind this goal has released a “Vision of Society in 2050” as an illustrated guide and animated video, showing what society might look like in 2050 when Goal 10 is realized. We found this to be rather bold for a government agency!

A third example to share is a lively collection of stories published this year entitled Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors. The purpose of this literary contest is to invite readers to consider positive future visions of climate progress – and especially to remember that “at the heart of climate solutions is human promise and ingenuity”. (Tamara loves that a genre exists called hopepunk.) The editors state:

For four years, this contest has celebrated stories that invite us to imagine the future we want — futures in which climate solutions flourish and we all thrive. These stories have never pretended the path will be easy — some of the most compelling Imagine stories showcase the struggle as well as the successes — but they all offer the promise that through the transformative power of radical imagining, we can envision a better world and work toward making it our reality.

Have the courage to share better, bolder futures – and then act on it!

There is a difference between incessantly demanding that we need a new future versus daring to depict what that future could look like. Of course, utopias are not real, but the first step to change is magical daydreaming. With people brave enough to imagine what a better future could look like – and let’s just start with could instead of should – we can let others know what might be possible. It is far easier to complain about the status quo than to step up and describe a better world. As one news headline put it, “we needn’t settle for Musk’s vision of the future.”

Be the future you envision.

When this future vision becomes bold and wildly ambitious, this moves closer to becoming a moonshot – a vision almost impossible to achieve and typically without precedents, requiring new knowledge and even new technologies to truly achieve. A moonshot often offers a vision of a better brighter world ahead.

Returning to our opening questions, who in your country is sharing visions of a positive future? Where have you seen great visions of a better utopian world? Let us know! We would love to hear more examples – and see how we can support too.

Reach us any time at hello@buildingmoonshots.com. (Tamara reads every email.)

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

About 15 years ago, we described this basic phenomenon with an Ambiguity Curve. Simply, when you start a new effort – such as a first-time business, a moonshot endeavor, or even a family – the earliest stages have the most questions. This early time is fraught with many open variables and unknowns. Often, you don’t even know what questions to ask, let alone know how to go about finding answers.

In our original 2010 model, the x-axis shows time starting from an initial concept progressing to later stages, and the corresponding y-axis shows ambiguity rising from none to high. When teams start, their ambiguity level is in the high zone – feeling almost infinite when faced with a completely novel opportunity – which is shown in the top left of our diagram.

Tamara likes this version of our diagram because it captures that starting intensity and wonderful chaos. Many teams recognize they often start a new opportunity or project with many different questions. As they learn more about their opportunity space and learn to ask more and better questions, through activities such as early user tests, they gain more information and more answers, and their ambiguity level steadily drops along the Ambiguity Curve. However, their ambiguity level never fully zeroes out because there’s always something the team doesn’t know is missing. (Examples would be “how will the market respond after we launch?” and “what new opportunities might emerge when our solutions change a customer’s behavior forever?”)

Bill prefers to swap the Ambiguity Curve, overlaid instead on our Four Horizons model. Same experience for an innovation team, though this version shows the ambiguity is highest during Horizon 4 (H4) – a time of imagination and envisioning – shown at the top right. On the other end at Horizon 1 (H1), business procedures and team activities tend to have far lower ambiguity, which is where you find quality checks and other standards in place that ensure all open questions have been properly addressed and there are no surprises.

The meaning of ambiguity

The concept of ambiguity is, in a circular manner, hard to define. We have heard that some languages, like Swedish, do not even have an exact translation of ambiguity.

Informally, humans say that something is “ambiguous” when it seems vague and unclear. In everyday life, you experience ambiguity when you hear that your medical test is “inconclusive”. Or, as you imagine a major career change, you can’t clearly see what that life would look like compared to your current familiar setup. These situations are not simple uncertainties, where you can recognize and compare clear options, such as “what drink do I want with lunch today?” Instead, you are faced with no obvious options, or you have no personal knowledge or experience of the range of possible choices, so therefore you have little to base your decision upon. Sometimes, you don’t even know if there are options to choose from or even if there is a decision to make, such as “is dropping out of college even an option for me?”

Of course, our visualization isn’t the first attempt to make teams aware of ambiguity. The most infamous model is the unknown unknowns, shortened to unk-unks, which are the factors that a team doesn’t realize that they don’t know so they cannot fully anticipate them. This model is often presented in a 2x2 matrix with (stay with us here!) known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns.

There is also the Johari window, a classic psychology framework from the mid-1950s. This framework describes blind spots as behaviors, feelings, or motivations that are known to others but not known to you (for example, a personal habit of avoiding difficult conversations that then affects team dynamics). A way to address blind spots is to seek feedback. In this model, unknown areas are aspects of yourself that are unknown both to others and to yourself, which creates extra ambiguity. The response in this case is to find fresh challenges that can help reveal new abilities or unleash new potential.

These types of models are meant to bring the topic of ambiguity to the forefront of decision making for a leader or team. Especially in innovation, a probing question is “what questions aren’t we able to ask today that could come back to haunt us later?”

Using our Ambiguity Curve model in real life

When we developed our model of the Ambiguity Curve, we placed time on the x-axis to help teams recognize, even embrace, that early zone of ambiguity. They can’t know all the questions that they will need to ask across their coming journey – and certainly not at the starting line.

Building moonshots begins with wildly high levels of ambiguity. A moonshot, by definition, has no precedent or clear examples to follow. It typically is the first time for that bold and highly ambitious goal, not just for that organization but typically in the world. As such, moonshot teams naturally spend more time in the high ambiguity zone, and team members need to remain energized despite this dive into the unknown. This is also a time of active imagination, where teams can literally stare into the clouds as they ask “more questions that we have whiteboards,” as Bill likes to say.

Where do you personally sit on the Ambiguity Curve? When Tamara asks groups to reflect on their personal comfort zone, most people tend to vote in the middle zone. This is totally normal and very human. Few people thrive in constant high ambiguity, nor do most people like the extreme opposite of complete predictability either.

She then asks where they would place the people they oversee or work with on the Ambiguity Curve. This secondary group is often placed lower on the curve, and this rings true for most organizations. Many managers help translate broad goals or loose plans from senior management for their direct reports. These managers create safe spaces for team members, where questions can be raised and addressed. Ambiguity is removed constructively and often collaboratively.

Moreover, you can recognize the leaders in a group because they step up as role models, helping those around them to navigate ambiguity – often during chaotic periods such as business transformation, corporate reorganization, and financial crises. Certain roles are useful here. For example, forward-looking investors and advisors can help junior teams and those facing their own version of unk-unks to consider more questions and realize what options are available.

We also want to support those in an organization who flourish in low ambiguity zones, such as those handling safety procedures, where they limit surprises and remove doubt.

For moonshot teams, the high ambiguity zone can be a giddy period of question seeking. As they explore and compare possible future scenarios, chase their curiosity, become extreme collaborators and communicators, and build experiments, they will slowly determine the questions that matter. And with each question, what the options and decisions could, and even should, be. We urge these teams to poke at the questions raised, challenging all assumptions – including those from experts, naysayers, and earlier pioneers who may mean well. This approach will empower the team to move down the Ambiguity Curve, paving the way for others to follow.

How could you imagine bringing the Ambiguity Curve into your work practices? We would love to hear from you!

Reach us any time at hello@buildingmoonshots.com. (Tamara reads every email.)

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

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💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

The team raised $230M over three funding rounds, launching its first product with a media splash in November 2023. Then it changed course just over a year later, as Humane announced last month that tech company HP would “acquire key AI capabilities from Humane, including their AI-powered platform Cosmos, highly skilled technical talent, and intellectual property with more than 300 patents and patent applications.”

In our view, Humane’s AI Pin was a brave and beautiful moonshot – and it should be celebrated as such. Let’s explore more why.

Revolutionary team culture

It may seem obvious to point out that pioneering new ground requires a real pioneer attitude combined with radical action. Founded in 2018 by two longtime Apple veterans (and married couple), Humane team members felt the moonshot vision at their core. Senior product engineer Yanir Nulman was an early team member and describes a passion to change the world in his LinkedIn post:

I joined Humane when we were just three employees—working on a greenfield project with a concentrated group of brilliant people was a dream come true (ask anyone I grew up with), and there were plenty of moments that exceeded that dream.
It was like getting a PhD in startups, leadership, design, hardware, software architecture, marketing—you name it.
The early days were magical. It was a place where we could wonder and explore the “what if” ideas scratching at the back of our minds. We dreamed up, sketched, and prototyped countless designs and experiences that kept me up at night, giddy with excitement about what the future could look like.
I fondly remember coming home each day, opening my almost-full notebook of ideas, and cramming in all the new thoughts that ran through my mind during my commute.
As we continued building the team, company, and product, we took plenty of seemingly impossible risks, yet there was always someone bold (or crazy) enough to devise a plan and get the job done…
It was far from easy. It was a lot of fun.

We’ve heard similar comments from other Humane team members, such as “It was a giant swing” and “I’m proud of getting something new into the world.” Yet would you believe these same words if uttered by an employee at <insert big tech company here>? Read the words above again and tell us honestly.

True technical breakthroughs

More than an exciting feeling or inspiring internal culture, the AI Pin required some major invention too. In the world of mobile devices, little has changed significantly since the first Apple iPhone in 2007 with its consumer touch screen. Since then, smartwatches and AI-enabled mobile features – such as facial recognition technology and real-time language translation – have provided enhanced capability but have not been a true step change.

The Humane team imagined and actually delivered a novel user interface (UI) alongside a sensor-based input system to recognize various finger gestures and more. They designed a clever laser display that exclusively and safely tracked to the human palm as a “vibrant canvas of text, graphics and UI elements.” Nulman summarized the technical journey:

We built an entire UI and process lifecycle architecture, connected an LLM to real-time web data (before it was cool), resolved component coexistence conflicts on a tiny hardware package, built a whole hand tracking and gesture recognition pipeline, embedded hardware-level security into our sensor stack, secured our backend with end to end encryption, miniaturized a laser display system, and so much more.

The AI Pin operating system called CosmOS (Tamara loves the pun!) had bold goals too, creating an entirely new platform for other mobile devices to leverage or mimic. As the Humane website describes:

CosmOS is engineered to make your digital world fade into the background, so you can connect seamlessly with its services while being immersed in the environment around you. CosmOS is contextually aware and adapts to your surroundings, ensuring that you receive information you need, when you need it.

By definition, moonshots forge new paths, which aren’t usually clear or smooth from the start. The Humane team had to work through various implementation challenges from pricing models to battery life to overheating devices – and yet they shipped a functioning solution that brought their big vision to life. Humane co-founder Bethany Bongiorno said at the start, “This is just the beginning. It is not perfect. Nothing is perfect.”

Regardless, even skeptical reporters were amazed, such as this Bloomberg correspondent who exclaimed:

The laser feature, which lets you control the pin by touching a projection on your palm, was genuinely impressive. As I pinched the beaming green light in my hand to play throwback songs from high school, I felt like I was in Star Trek.

Scooped by a major tech company

HP saw the potential and scooped up the startup. The Humane team will form HP IQ, a new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services for the future of work. Jared Ostdiek, head of product design engineering at Humane, will join HP along with other team members and told us that he can’t wait to see how AI products will advance “in the years to come”.

These future products will owe special credit to the Humane team. They broke exceptional new ground with the AI Pin. Humane engineer Yanir Nulman remains optimistic and says, “We're entering an extraordinary era of innovation, where moonshots are closer to Earth than ever before.” And while the AI Pin is being discontinued – at least in its current form – its patents, knowledge, and team passion continue. Nulman even adds, “I can’t wait to do it all over again.”

What do you think? Let us know at hello@buildingmoonshots.com. (Tamara reads every email.)

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

Lesson 1: Your innovation role should change as you change

Building moonshots doesn’t care how old you are. The first lesson that fascinated us was how Toone’s work and role related to innovation shifted as his career path changed – before he got to BEV.

At the start of his career, Toone was a professor at Duke University researching physical organic and biophysical chemistry. Through the 2000s, he then spun out three pharmaceutical companies with colleagues based on research they patented, taking one company public. This science-into-startup experience gave him firsthand experience on the bumpy and typically longer process for translating new discoveries into applied research into market solutions.

After working nearly 20 years as “Professor” Toone, he had an unexpected opportunity to find and fund others on similar tech-to-market journeys that he’d done. He then returned to Duke in 2013 to lead the university’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, which aims to expand the societal impact of inventions across the Duke community. Toone remains a strong believer in this mission, telling Carleton that “It’s imperative that we use research in the service of mankind.”

Toone’s timing challenges some persistent myths in innovation. One belief is that most scientists in physics, chemistry, and medicine make their biggest impact before their mid-30s. Another belief is that breakthrough innovation is a game for young college dropouts – anyone over 25 already miss their window? In reality, multiple roles and a myriad of skills are required across the innovation pathway – including building expertise in deep tech research, converting academic papers into marketable solutions, and leveraging these skills to place big bets on potential moonshot-level opportunities. All this learning takes time. We were delighted to see Toone keep levelling up!

Lesson 2: Moonshot opportunities are a mix of planning and luck

Sometimes life can throw you a wild card. A second lesson is that moonshot opportunities may emerge through luck, so it is good to be open to chance. Between his periods at Duke, Toone had the invitation of a lifetime that led him to pivot unexpectedly from the field of chemistry to energy.

As a brief backstory… In 2007, the US government established the America COMPETES Act, which greenlit the concept of a new energy agency called ARPA-E to fund the development of advanced energy technologies. As the current website states, ARPA-E is:

The disruption wing of the Department of Energy (DOE). First. Fast. Ambitious. We’re an agency of energy scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and industry visionaries who dare to disrupt the status quo… We focus on diverse technologies that can be meaningfully advanced with a small amount of funding and active project management over a defined period of time.

Yet ARPA-E had a slow start, existing only on paper because funds weren’t allocated until two years later through a different Congressional Act. Once President Obama made a formal announcement about ARPA-E in 2009, project applications began to arrive. However, there were no ARPA-E employees to handle them, so a national hiring process was rushed into place.

Toone knew Dr. Kristina Johnson, who had been Duke’s engineering school dean in the early 2000s and was then serving as Under Secretary of Energy at DOE. Not only was she responsible for managing a $10 billion energy portfolio of projects, but she also actively sought talent for this fledging government agency. Johnson asked Toone to help briefly due to his knowledge of science and startups, so he agreed.

Toone said, “I was employee #2!” He laughed in hindsight and added, “I knew nothing about energy, but I knew Kristina Johnson. That’s how I get into clean tech.”

While Toone describes himself simply as an ARPA-E “founding member,” we see him as directly shaping a major government funding agency during its formative years, responsible for finding and backing multiple teams with moonshot ambition – when ambiguity is high, and few precedents exist. Through 2009, Toone served as a program director and even brought some of his chemistry knowledge to ARPA-E, managing the Electrofuels program that explored the use of non-photosynthetic autotrophic organisms to produce energy-dense, infrastructure-compatible liquid fuels. He soon took over from the Agency’s first director Arun Majumdar, serving as ARPA-E’s deputy director and chief technical officer for the next two years.

ARPA-E has had an outsized impact on American energy innovation. As the Agency states: “Since 2009, ARPA-E has provided $4.07 billion in funding to more than 1,690 energy ideas, giving our country's disruptors the freedom to find out if their outlier ideas can have industry impact.”

Lesson 3: A big metric helps wildly ambitious (moonshot) teams to prioritize

The third lesson is that a clear and single success metric matters. Across his various career stages, Toone progressed from discovering science to shipping science to funding science – each stage seeking ‘impact’ through measurable outcomes. In our experience, having a singular target that shows the big outcome focuses the long journeys of moonshots.

After finishing his ARPA-E rotation in 2013, Toone returned to Duke for about four years. However, his ARPA-E experience eventually caught the attention of recruiters, seeking to expand the team behind BEV. He then joined BEV in 2017 where he has since been.

BEV began as a billionaire alliance, led by tech leader and philanthropist Bill Gates. In 2015, Gates announced Breakthrough Energy Coalition as a group of 28 high net-worth investors – including venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Facebook founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Japanese investor Masayoshi Son – committed to funding innovative clean energy. This group felt an aggressive global effort was necessary to meet the urgency of world climate change. As the website announced then, “The new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions, and investors.”

Within a year, this coalition crystallized into Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) with a massive fund. Gates had pledged to invest $1 billion over the next five years, and the other members would jointly match at least that amount in the same period. Now on its third fund, BEV invests mainly in companies with a ROI (return on investment) timeline of 20 years, compared to the usual 10-year window for venture-backed startups. Top-tier venture capitalist John Doerr – who also donated funds to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability with his wife Ann – described this patient capital approach as requiring “a really long point of view”. Reinforcing this same point, our Building Moonshots book starts with Moonshot Way 1: Always Focus on the Long View.

In his chat with Tamara Carleton, Toone pointed out that BEV itself is not chasing a classic moonshot. He said, “It’s a little bit different. With a moonshot, you have a singular goal in mind, and then you build those technologies to make that goal.” He explained, “At BEV, there isn’t a singular goal like clean tech. We invest in a number of different technologies.”

Yet BEV has a wildly ambitious goal to reach net-zero emissions from 51 billion tons of emissions generated annually today. To put this in context, the United States as a developed country generates slightly over 6 million metric tons annually, based on 2022 data.

How does BEV place its big bets? Its primary metric is to fund companies whose technologies can reduce carbon by at least one-half gigaton every year (i.e., 0.5 billion or 500 million metric tons). To truly achieve net-zero then, this means that BEV needs to find and fund at least 102 companies able to successfully hit this metric – and fast. Aside from a break during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of global carbon emissions has increased each year.

We feel this one big metric reinforces earlier book points made in our Moonshot Way 22: Adopt Bold Metrics. We wrote that “leaders should adopt bold metrics to motivate moonshot teams to aim high and ensure a moonshot is really moonshot worthy, separate from business as usual.” We definitely see BEV pushing for this transformative mindset and commitment in its teams. And it works. Toone joked that the teams pitching them are bright enough to show how they can always achieve a 0.56 billion reduction, slightly better than the already insanely bar set by BEV.

Carleton floated the idea that this threshold might provoke some actual moonshots in BEV’s portfolio. However, she didn’t have the time with Toone to dig fully into this point, so we invite our readers to add their views. Are you familiar with BEV, and what do you think?

Let us know at hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

The quick response is a moonshots mindset. A longer response follows on how you can adopt a moonshots mindset in two steps.

Being in the right mind

First, let’s talk briefly about what a mindset is. A mindset is the mental attitude and beliefs that you bring to any situation. Having the right mindset is crucial because this mindset influences your motivation and overall approach to action.

Different mindsets abound. For example, maybe you have heard about fixed and growth mindsets. A growth mindset encourages a person to view challenges as opportunities for learning and personal growth – especially critical in education. An exponential mindset focuses on rapidly scaling the value of an idea. Or you have read about scarcity and abundance mindsets. With an abundance mindset, a person believes that enough resources and opportunities exist for everyone. This mindset encourages seeing situations in win/win (versus win/lose) terms – changing how groups consider outcomes ranging from sports to politics to medicine to economics. Author Simon Sinek names this an ‘infinite mindset’ based on the ideas in James P. Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games.

A mindset is a deeper, more ingrained way of thinking, which underpins your disposition and shapes the habits you develop over time. Changing a mindset doesn’t happen instantly. It involves a deliberate and conscious effort to shift your beliefs, attitudes, and thought patterns into a new way of thinking.

Big visions with a moonshots mindset

A moonshots mindset aims for big visions with potential big impact. This mindset encourages pursuing a long-term vision that feels almost impossible to achieve and dares groups to dream wilder and bolder. A team that has a moonshots mindset goes beyond conventional solutions – what seems easy or obvious – and instead pursues radical change that can lead to major breakthroughs for industries and society. The namesake original moonshot imagined putting a human on the moon and took a decade of concerted effort to accomplish it.

Any step toward innovation – from baby steps to massive leaps – is good. At times, nations and teams need the small, steady steps of incremental innovation – critical, for instance, when ensuring public services improvement or maintaining economic stability. Yet other times, nations and teams really need radical innovation (in fact, see our previous post for why Europe needs a Ministry of Moonshots). This is when a moonshots mindset is important.

When groups adopt a larger perspective, they demand more from themselves. They exert greater effort and reach for more because they feel connected to a larger purpose that they play a direct role in shaping. The strength of this bold thinking encourages them to step beyond their comfort zone and expand the range of opportunities possible.

Step 1: Take vision to heart

A moonshots mindset occurs as a self-reinforcing mix of feeling the big vision and doing the big vision. Feeling like a vision is truly yours involves a deep connection and commitment to that vision. Essentially, you take the vision to heart. One way of internalizing a vision is to think about how it resonates with your own experiences, dreams, and goals.

Some of you might be asking how you can do this step if you or your organization doesn’t have a big vision yet. You can instead introduce a visionary ideal in discussions, which helps put existing work in a larger context. Challenge yourself and others by frequently asking:

• How might our current efforts fit into a bigger vision?

• What do we really want in the long run?

As Tamara jokes sometimes, not everyone needs to be at the front of the rocket – but you all need to feel like you are on the same wild ride. A wonderful example is Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer at SpaceX. She works with Elon Musk – who is cofounder, CEO, chairman, and chief technical officer of SpaceX – and whose company vision is to reduce space transportation costs and “make life multiplanetary”. Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002, and six years later, was promoted to president.

As a recent Financial Times article notes:

For 22 years, Shotwell has helped to guide Musk’s moonshot project to disrupt the space industry. This week, SpaceX became the world’s biggest private start-up, valued at $350bn.

Both Musk and Shotwell embody a moonshots mindset. Eric Berger, who has written two books about SpaceX, says “they share a lot of traits. It is SpaceX versus the world and they’ve been simpatico on that from day one.” The article adds:

She now oversees more than 13,000 staff tasked with developing reusable rockets capable of carrying humans to Mars. “If Elon is the visionary, she is the get-shit-done person,” says one employee. “She transforms vision into reality, watches the bottom line, manages the exec team and keeps him away from regulators.”

In their own way, they each focus on the outsized vision of SpaceX. Since she joined, Shotwell has taken the SpaceX vision to heart and then rose to leading much of the vision.

Step 2: Create new habits

As you become excited and emotionally invested in a moonshot, you should start to reinforce that feeling through doing. In psychology, this is called behavioral activation. The more you invest your time and effort, the more connected you will feel to the vision. This applies to individuals as much as groups.

In our Building Moonshots book, we introduce six specific ways that contribute to fostering a moonshots mindset:

Each of these ways involves a set of habits. By creating consistent patterns of behavior that reinforce a new way of thinking, habits lead to a mindset change. These repeated actions help form new neural pathways in the brain, making a moonshots mindset a regular part of your (group’s) way of working.

In Way 6: Be an Optimist above, one example highlighted in our book is from Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s moonshot factory X. He emphasizes optimism as one lesson for unleashing radical creativity, saying “Dream like a child, test like a grownup.” He explains, “You can get way further than you think just by being optimistic enough to try.”

Two habits anyone can do for smart daydreaming – either during or off work hours – is mental wandering and literal wandering. You could start by scheduling brief windows of unstructured time to let your mind wander freely without specific tasks or goals. Or you could take walks in nature, preferably with a colleague, that offers a change of scenery to provoke shared daydreaming. (Read our wandering series here.)

Repeat and renew

In summary, embracing a moonshots mindset occurs in two steps. Step 1 is to take the vision (or visionary ideals) to heart. Step 2 is to create new habits. Having a moonshots mindset becomes core to making visionary decisions and making moonshot-class ideas real. Leaders and teams with this mindset take the long view, believe in doing the impossible, and push for opportunities that might seem almost impossible to others.

Moreover, the six Moonshot Ways, noted above in Step 2, will be saved as topics in future newsletters. Is there a particular Way that you would like to hear about sooner? Let us know at hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

Read Draghi’s short take in an invited piece in The Economist or the full report at nearly 400 pages (in two parts).

What does Draghi’s vision have to do with moonshots?

Taking a moonshot mindset

First, Draghi challenges EU politicians to act boldly and go bigger – in other words, to take a moonshot mindset. He pushes EU policymakers to move beyond the current “existential crisis” on the continent by addressing European tech investment, the green transition, and defense.

In doing so, Draghi received considerable criticism from a slew of commentators, business executives, even academics. It is too easy to say it cannot be done!

Bolstering Draghi’s proposal, consider Vinod Khosla’s language from a recent podcast with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM). For those that don’t recognize the names, Khosla is a legendary inventor, innovator, and investor, and a billionaire business leader, and NBIM is the largest single investor in the world’s stock markets. Khosla described the “power of the improbable”, which builds on points he raised in his TED Talk earlier this year, especially his closing remarks on how “a really abundant world is possible.”

The EU already has top universities. Europe offers an attractive market. As one European entrepreneur from a hot AI startup pointed out recently, “Nearly half of our revenue came from European countries this year”. Yet one reason that persuaded them to leave Europe is entirely about mindset: “America’s willingness to build the future.” Guillaume Roux-Romestaing writes:

Americans are naturally more optimistic, more risk-prone and more forward-thinking than we are. This stems from different histories and socio-economic circumstances. It has an evident impact on how much more dynamic their tech ecosystems are and will continue to be. However, that’s no excuse for Europe to lag. We need to get back to work and stop being so gloomy about the future. We need to start building again… We have so much going for us. We have talent, capital, a solid work culture, stable institutions and a massive market (500m Europeans with an average GDP per capita higher than the rest of the world, bar a few outliers).

Fostering the ARPA culture

Second, Draghi calls out the need for an EU agency to pursue “disruptive innovation”, specifically:

… a genuine “ARPA-type agency”, supporting high-risk projects with the potential of delivering breakthrough technological advances.

This resonated with us! Some of you know that Tamara had her earlier DARPA research featured as a chapter in a seminal book documenting DARPA’s model for transformative technologies (download free here). We have written about ARPA-inspired variants in the US and globally, such as ARPA-E and SPRIN-D. Plus, Tamara was recently invited to speak about the ARPA model at a US National Academies roundtable (alongside ARPA-E deputy director Danny Cunningham, former DARPA program manager John Paschkewitz, and private ARPA organization Speculative Technologies CEO Ben Reinhardt).

We challenge people reading Draghi to embrace the ARPA culture more than its organizational model. Based on the original DARPA agency, the ARPA model is predicated on an American context and way of working, which doesn’t directly translate into Europe. And we all know comparisons to DARPA’s budget are unfair, especially when much of the real funding is classified. Moreover, recent ARPA-inspired entities – like ARPA-H and ARIA – have changed the ARPA model to better address their unique needs.

In short, it is the ARPA culture that drives the moonshot mindset that we see Draghi urging, including:

• Risk taking: Encouraging bold, high-risk, high-reward efforts that push the boundaries of technology and science.

• Interdisciplinary collaboration: Bringing together experts from different fields and empowering passionate mavericks to tackle complex problems from multiple angles.

• Rapid decision making: Relying on a lightweight, almost flat hierarchy without the classic committee or peer review process for greenlighting ideas with great potential.

Launching a Ministry of Moonshots

In the report, Draghi focuses readers on the financial requirements to accelerate innovation, close the skills gap, sustain the investments, revamp the competitive model, and strengthen governance – all described in the second part.

So, borrowing from sci-fi – a moonshot way highlighted in our Building Moonshots book – in the spirit of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, we recommend that the European Commission create a Ministry of Moonshots for Europe that can serve as the beacon of a bold and positive future.

A Ministry of Moonshots can serve as the tip of the spear for European competitiveness and renewal. It can take a more expansive EU+ approach, inviting the nearby nations of Norway, Switzerland, and Great Britain to join forces and funding. This new agency should focus on agency – giving big ideas the power and resources to fulfill their potential and ensuring these ideas are handed across various funding groups, so they continue critical momentum.

Let’s rise to Draghi’s call to action for Europe! There is still much truth to the classic maxims:

• Fortune favors the bold.

• Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

• You have to start somewhere!

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

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💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

So why are we still finding the concept of missions used interchangeably or incorrectly in terms of moonshots? Mixing up moonshots and missions is not like confusing desert and dessert. Experts, if we dare say, should know the difference between moonshots and missions because this distinction confirms their expertise in the matter.

How moonshots and missions relate

In 1961, a moonshot referred specifically to the ambitious goal of landing humans on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. The original moonshot was defined by its uncertainty and ambiguity; humans had never been to the moon (much less returned), so it was a big bet that humanity’s knowledge and technologies were ready to make it happen.

Over time, the term moonshot has come to symbolize human ambition and the pursuit of seemingly unattainable goals. These grand visions provoke teams to think bigger and aim higher, to drive society forward, and to imagine a radically better world.

A mission is a specific task for a group to achieve, such as a covert military operation or a major space project. America’s defining moonshot was built upon a decade of space missions, each proving a specific task – such as a novel engine design or new type of space suit material. Building upon the successes of the Mercury and Gemini missions, the first lunar landing happened on the Apollo 11 mission, which was the fifth crewed mission of NASA’s Apollo program. Beyond the moon, different nations today are pursuing multiple missions seeking to get to Mars.

In short, multiple missions function as stepping stones to a big vision – or moonshot.

One economist’s moonshot and mission jargon

Unfortunately, a major source of confusion – often for our European colleagues in government – was started by Mariana Mazzucato, an economics professor at University College London whose work has influenced the EU’s Green New Deal. She invoked moonshots in a 2019 op-end headline that stated grandly: “To change the world, governments need to launch new moonshots.” However, her piece focused largely on missions as the way to achieve public sector change and didn’t really address how missions relate to moonshots.

Then in 2021, she popularized the notion of “mission-driven innovation” in her book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. In this book, she urges policymakers to apply NASA’s mission-driven approach – specifically from the Apollo 11 mission – toward the wicked problems facing societies today. We feel that Mazzucato aims to evoke the bold (and you might even say, American can-do) spirit of the NASA endeavor more than the process itself to counter stodgy European planning.

Her overzealous wording has led to some issues. First, the book title and subtitle are often misconstrued. Mazzucato presents one moonshot, which is to rethink the capitalist system and role of governments as “part policy critique, part manifesto,” as one book reviewer put it. Her vision is an interventionist and even idealized altruistic state. Two key elements — though not new or novel, are sorely needed — are more public-private partnerships and more cross-agency collaboration. The book is not a guide to other moonshots except her own (and whether her vision qualifies as a moonshot is a topic for another day!).

A second issue is that Mazzucato’s language is obscure and circular at times. In this book and further discussed in a EU commissioned report she wrote, she places a mission (such as “100 carbon neutral cities by 2030”) under a grand challenge (such as “climate change”). In her version, missions have ambitious goals, “come in different shapes and sizes,” and sit “between broad challenges and concrete projects”. She sees multiple missions addressing a single grand challenge, and a grand challenge can link to a UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) or Societal Challenge in the EU Horizon 2020 program. In the report, she does not mention grand challenges can serve as moonshots, hers aside. Confusing, right?

A rose by any other name

What Mazzucato is positing aligns with an existing approach of challenge-based innovation (see more in this 2012 study), though we agree adding a moonshot flavor makes it sound cooler. One modification is that she recommends pursuing multiple missions simultaneously to achieve bigger outcomes. In contrast, a government agency like NASA typically stacks missions as a learning ladder toward an ultimate vision.

Mazzucato has since moved on to bashing consultants and other topics. Regardless, the OECD and others have embraced her concept as “mission-oriented innovation” and “mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIP)” – with one analyst attempting to clarify mission terminology (though in attempting this noble act, he mislabels “moonshots as a type of mission” – argh!).

In the end, the distinction between moonshots and missions isn’t just academic – it’s essential. After all, it’s not just about achieving the big vision, it’s about understanding the journey and the words that get you there. So the lesson here is: multiple, measurable missions stack up to achieve a moonshot.

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

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(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

As a quick recap, TRLs were first introduced by NASA in the 1970s (then only with seven levels) as a way to assess the maturity of a technology through its development cycle. By the 1990s, NASA adopted a TRL scale with nine levels to simply and visually show the progression of a new technology going from basic research concept (level 1) through various demo and testing efforts (levels 2-8) to a successful launch (level 9), classically depicted as a thermometer. (See a good historical review here and here.)

Today, TRLs are standard practice within NASA and across the aerospace industry – since added to ISO standards for space system hardware – and applied to many other tech areas from defense to consumer electronics. Groups use the TRL scale in multiple ways, including to evaluate proposal financing, assess a project’s next stage, track emerging technologies, and manage a tech portfolio.

At the start of the classic TRL scale, TRL 1 deals with basic research. For example, imagine a team investigating a new material with unique quantum properties. As part of their research, they observe the material’s behavior in controlled laboratory conditions. However, no practical application or prototype exists yet. At this early stage, TRL 1 is all about understanding the material’s fundamental properties and basic principles.

The value and activities of TRL 0

Yet little has been discussed before TRL 1 occurs, which is naturally TRL 0.

Few researchers start de novo. So how do teams begin? How do they know what to focus on before undertaking the step of research or invention? With this in mind, we recognize a critical prep stage of TRL 0 – a period of indeterminate time marked by curiosity, exploration, and what-if questions. Bill Cockayne likes to call this stage as wallowing, in the sense that you are rolling around in a particular topic area and indulging in an unrestrained way.

We love how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos describes this early activity in his 2018 Letter to Shareholders as the “power of wandering,” where teams keep a beginner’s mind. He writes:

Wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering. [emphasis in original]

Bezos highlights some important points that pertain to TRL 0, whether you are innovating in a company or not. First, we wholeheartedly agree that the activity of wandering is not aimless. It is a loosely guided and wonderfully messy process of learning.

Second, the more you embrace wandering, the greater your chances for finding “outsized discoveries” – which are akin to moonshots. Rarely are big ideas produced on demand. At Stanford, Bill studied how innovation ideas emerged in the wild, as networks of ideas and teams informally circulated in parallel as both took shape and crystallized as a clear opportunity to take forward.

In fact, researchers find eureka moments emerge from an incubation stage, occur occurring when people’s minds roam freely versus focusing squarely on the problem (like this study). These types of flowing interactions happen before patents, before new company filings, and before other more obvious indicators – often thwarting scholars who can’t see how to measure an entire elusive, frothy, and organic set of activities that activates and fertilizes the soil for future efforts.

Alongside wandering, TRL 0 activities focus on working through half-baked ideas through intentional dialogue, collecting semi-related bits of knowledge and media for sense-making and pattern finding (akin to crime mapping), reading, observing, listening deeply to customers and other groups, and traveling, amid other efforts. At Stanford, our design group relied on a process dubbed needfinding to help uncover latent user needs.

Another useful technique during TRL 0 are what if? prompts, opening up possibilities and alternate scenarios. In fact, US health agency ARPA-H created a magnificent poster series based on different what if? questions, which were discussed in different forums they organized, ultimately resulting in funded research programs – an instance of TRL 0 converting into TRL 1.

TRL 0 in real life

Mentions of TRL 0 are scattered across the internet and R&D community like breadcrumbs. We have found a passing mention of TRL 0 by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science and a few other places.

The European Commission adapted the TRL scale in 2014 for its Horizon 2020 projects, unexpectedly adding TRL 0 to represent a completely unproven “blue sky” idea before TRL levels 1-9:

TRL 0: Idea. Unproven concept, no testing has been performed.

Yet while recognizing the existence of TRL 0, the EC has focused largely on mid to late TRL stages, as one EU group describes:

The Research and Innovation Actions cover typically projects starting at TRL 2 -3 and reaching TRL 5-6 while the Innovation Actions are covering projects that start at TRL4-5 and end at TRL6-8. [sic]

A consultancy specializing in EU grant support reaffirmed the need for a TRL 0 for certain funded projects, especially noting that European Research Council (ERC) projects pursuing frontier research “should be TRL 0, but this level does not exist in the TRL scale.”

Furthermore, other TRL-inspired scales have since been introduced – a topic for another newsletter someday! – and frankly, all would benefit with a TRL 0 equivalent.

And don’t get us started on the missing TRL 10 next. 😉

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

DARPA’s Heilmeier Catechism

A classic checklist has been DARPA’s Heilmeier Catechism, which has become popular in R&D press lately. This checklist has been a core part of DARPA’s innovation model for decades, allowing them to consider which high-risk opportunities to chase. As the agency says about itself:

DARPA operates on the principle that generating big rewards requires taking big risks. But how does the Agency determine what risks are worth taking?

George Heilmeier – a DARPA director who is featured in the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his pioneering work in liquid crystal displays – introduced a set of questions in the late 1970s. Those inside and outside DARPA use these questions to think through early risk/reward scenarios and evaluate potential proposals. These questions are straightforward:

DARPA Heilmeier Catechism

1. What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.

2. How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?

3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?

4. Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?

5. What are the risks?

6. How much will it cost?

7. How long will it take?

8. What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

Why the Heilmeier Catechism works

DARPA program managers and teams applying for DARPA funding have devotedly used these Heilmeier questions since their introduction. Why do these eight “HQs” work, surviving the test of time? First, much work in blue-sky research and vision-led innovation, including at DARPA, is more of a sensibility than a strict system. The term catechism helps to capture this sensibility. By definition, a catechism serves as oral instruction or a learning introduction to someone new to a doctrine, often phrased as questions followed by answers to be memorized.

Second, while seemingly easy, the Heilmeier Catechism acts as a reality check for teams. Posed in everyday language, these questions serve as a forcing function for teams to substantiate the relevance and broader implications of their work. These questions embody the principle of Occam’s razor. By capturing what is essential – before all the pitch slides and financial spreadsheets – the Heilmeier Catechism begins to move teams from imagination to the hard work of making the idea real.

Adaption by ARPA-H

Moreover, these questions have influenced other moonshot groups. Consider ARPA-H, a newly formed government agency focused on medical breakthroughs and transformative health solutions. In 2023, ARPA-H adapted the Heilmeier Catechism from DARPA, cleverly remaking it their own by calling it as ARPA(H)eilmeier Questions, and adapting for a medical context. ARPA-H also documented the hidden questions behind their HQs, which provide a general guide for developing a clear program concept. We marked their changes and additions in italics font from the original DARPA set:

ARPA(H)eilmeier Questions:

1. What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. What health problem are you trying to solve?

2. How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice limitations of present approaches?

3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful at this time?

4. Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?

5. What are the risks?

6. How long will it the program take?

7. How much will it the program cost?

8. What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

9. To ensure equitable access to all people, how will cost, accessibility, and user experience be addressed?

10. How might this program be misperceived or misused (and how can you prevent that from happening)?

Why do you think ARPA-H made these changes? In a public statement, the US administration explained that while DARPA offers an “excellent inspiration” for ARPA-H, it is not a perfect model for biomedical and health research. Many feel ARPA-H’s work is further complicated by human behavior, medical regulations, and biological systems compared to DARPA’s world of defense. Others in the health community – like the authors in this opinion piece – argue that ARPA-H needs these extra safeguards, plus even more to prevent major biosecurity accidents like the COVID-19 pandemic (incidentally, whose mRNA vaccines came from DARPA work).

Other Variations

Other variations exist. One example comes from VTT, Finland’s national institute for applied research. In 2019, VTT started a deep-tech incubation program called LaunchPad, and internal teams often start with a commercialization workshop that addresses similar Heilmeier questions as follows:

VTT LaunchPad workshop questions:

• What is the bold global impact that could be achieved in 10 years based on the technology you have developed?

• How to achieve the long-term impact?

• Who has the most burning need?

• Where should the project be in 3 years to be on the desired development path?

• Who should be involved in building the dream and who are the ones who could help?

Another example comes from the MacArthur Foundation, which has pursued multiple Big Bets as “time-limited investments in grantmaking with the potential for transformative change” in the past decade – funding $1.05 billion to 483 nonprofits to date according to one analysis. Their Big Bets approach has followed a set of guiding questions that considers ambition, boldness, and timeliness among other aspects.

What questions or tools have you found most helpful in your work?

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

People have long planned in three horizons. In finance, investors regularly recommend three horizons in a financial portfolio, considering the short-term, midterm, and long-term investment cycles. Say you’re a young couple. You are budgeting for a summer vacation trip (a short-term need) while simultaneously setting funds aside for a down payment for a new house you two hope to buy in a few years (a midterm need) and saving for a retirement cushion at least two decades out (a long-term need). This triple stacking of financial decisions also assumes that the couple has discussed what they want in life together, which gives them a shared vision.

Likewise in business, teams have adopted similar horizon planning. The most well-known model is the three horizons of growth described by McKinsey consultants – better known from HBR articles than the original book 25 years ago – for companies to assess business opportunity without affecting present performance. In brief, their three horizons correspond to core businesses (Horizon 1), emerging businesses (H2), and entirely new businesses (H3) for a company. Incidentally, these authors focus most of their book on the first two horizons, which we find tends to be the comfort zone of strategy consultants. They also assume that senior management already has defined H3 priorities.

The need for a fourth horizon

Any conversation about the future we’ve had with groups inevitably finds us drawing horizons on a whiteboard or napkin. And in nearly every case, we’ve ended up extending past the traditional three horizons – P&L, NBD, R&D to use corporate shorthand – to the fourth horizon of vision or novel ideas. This fourth horizon has always existed in the work of teams who create radically better futures, including early SpaceX (“Occupy Mars” is merely one version), Alan Kay’s Dynabook vision at Xerox PARC, or in the use of pure science fiction-into-science fact with NASA’s pioneering efforts with Waldos and medical trauma pods.

As we reflected on these conversations, plus radical innovation more broadly, it simply made sense to codify a fourth horizon. We summarized the Four Horizons model of innovation in our Building Moonshots book last year, especially in Moonshot Way #2: Start from the almost impossible. (Loyal readers will find earlier echoes in our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation from a decade prior, where we lay out the three phrases of perspective, opportunity, and solution with the next phase of tools discussing vision.)

In addition, we expand the model beyond companies because a range of teams and organizations work from vision. In fact, we highlight multiple examples in our Building Moonshots book from industry, education, health, government, foundations, and other domains. Simply put, Horizon 1 (H1), groups are focused on near-term priorities, which is the usual domain of incremental innovation. In Horizon 2 (H2), groups are addressing mid-term priorities, such as the next product line or adjacent “market” category to pursue. Horizon 3 (H3) considers long-term priorities, such as R&D investments and lab experiments. We then added Horizon 4 (H4) to recognize the critical vision-setting step. What offers the north star? How do you find the new seeds in H3 that are worthy of attention and resources?

Labeling a spectrum of horizons

Labeling the horizons can help teams know what efforts matter at which stage. Frankly, different groups explain their activities in their own way across the four horizons to show a progression. In the diagram above, we have used « Improve / Implement / Invent / Imagine » for the horizons, language that we find resonates with many teams. Another phrasing combination is « Now / Next / New / NorthStar ». Tech giant Meta explained their first three horizons as « Ecosystems / Products / Technologies » in the company’s 2016 10-year roadmap in light of their H4 vision to “give everyone in the world the power to share anything”.

A more organic horizon metaphor that we’ve found works well emphasizes natural growth: H1 as trees, H2 as plants, H3 as seeds, and H4 as inspiration – in fact, Logitech’s former CEO used this seed-to-tree metaphor in a 2020 media interview. Trees are well established with deep roots in H1, fields of plants offer potential to become a cash crop in H2, while new types of seeds and cultivation techniques are explored in H3.

Adding horizon filters for advanced analysis

As many of you know, we believe all efforts in innovation matter – from small steps to big steps. We focus more on the moonshots side because we feel this area is less understood and only lightly documented – besides the ongoing breathy manifestos for it. Yet leaders know radical innovation needs to be addressed. Just recently, Nike’s CEO John Donahoe said: “we realigned our company, and over the last year we have been ruthlessly focused on rebuilding our disruptive innovation pipeline along with our iterative innovation pipeline” [emphasis added].

One way to see across pipeline efforts is to add multiple layers of analysis – also known as “swim lanes” or “cake slices” – to a four horizons map. In doing so, teams can identify actions or considerations at each horizon respective to that layer. One swim lane could be TALENT: for example, what skills and job roles does your group need as you grow, both within a horizon and at the boundary crossings? Or another swim lane might be related to METRICS or key performance indicators because how groups measure healthy “trees” in H1 should be different than the “seeds” in H3. (And a recent fun example: our VTT colleague Arho Suominen adopted our 4H model to add the layers of “leadership drives” and “foresight supports” in a LinkedIn post that went viral in the Nordic foresight community.)

Using the Four Horizons for strategy

The Four Horizons model of innovation offers a highly flexible framework for strategic planning, benchmarking, and other work. See one leadership team above plotting their future roadmap using our 4H model as a backbone, mapping activities by swim lane themes (hint: look top left of the photo for the color themes).

How have you been using a four horizons model? Drop us a line!

Read more on Four Horizons:

• How to track tech breakthroughs: Looking at the state of AI using the Four Horizons model

• Wander Part III: What types of ideas should you capture when starting moonshots?

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

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💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

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OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

This latest milestone continues a journey imagined in science fiction from the 1940s. Early attempts to build working systems began in the late 1960s. Then to make its way to the ISS, spaceMira advanced multiple features—conceptual, engineering, and breakthrough—of the telesurgery and surgical robot ecosystem. The MIRA technology was already an engineering achievement in robotic surgery solutions, weighing roughly 1,000 times lighter than other surgical robots and offering a portable, simple setup for use outside of a traditional medical operating room.

Most people don’t realize that the connection between space and telesurgery was already a core concept in the first-generation virtual reality (VR) work happening at the NASA Ames Research Center, led by Scott Fisher with Joe Rosen at Stanford University. This effort would eventually draw in many of the “big names” and seminal inventions during these early VR years, well chronicled here amid other sources. In this era, the focus on concept-into-technology—or science fiction to science fact—led to some lofty delusions from reporters then. [The media zeal also provoked one college student to imagine how immersive VR could upend hands-on engineering learning and the entire process of invention, but that’s a story for another newsletter!]

One crazy idea arrived from DARPA via a program manager who would serve a record three rotations at the Pentagon’s innovation agency (the common rule of tenure is “one and done”). Rick Satava invoked science fiction, funding DARPA’s dual-use Advanced Biomedical Training Program in the 1990s—which included a war zone evacuation system based on the trauma pod from the classic 1959 book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. (As an aside, this book has sparked many thinkers and inventors as one writer notes.)

Satava’s program funded an SRI team, who worked first with Ames as they built and tested a nascent telesurgery platform. A team of entrepreneurs would come along years later to license their initial telesurgery platform—which in turn would become the foundation for Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Telesurgery System that ultimately set the standard of care for telerobotic surgery (and that we assume is the likely “other robots” mentioned as 1000x heavier than the MIRA!).

Another major stepping-stone included the invention of the RAVEN in the mid-2000s, an open-source surgical robot by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The RAVEN has been used in experiments—both technical and surgical—at numerous American universities and, one must assume, by the program sponsors in the US Army.

And on February 10, spaceMIRA completed its first surgery demo at ISS operated remotely by surgeons on earth—approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers) below in the Midwest US.

Overall, this news announcement of spaceMIRA is a fascinating step in a much longer and ambitious vision for operating medical robots remotely and safely from a distance. Moreover, this example brings to life at least three of the Moonshot Ways from the Building Moonshots book:

• Way 9: Devour Hard Science Fiction

• Way 23: Plan for Targets to Evolve

• Way 54: Play a Continuous Game

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

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💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

“I'd be happy if by the end of my career, we can get something as smart as a cat.”
– Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist

AI researchers have been chasing the AGI holy grail since the founding of the field. As LeCunn added, “Obviously, we’re missing something really, really big. So we're nowhere near human level intelligence, despite what you might hear from the most optimistic people who tell you AGI is just around the corner.”

His comments were part of a broader concerted effort by Meta to own more of the AI narrative emerging from last year’s GenAI fanfare. Meta’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has frequently shared his goal to build advanced AI tech into the company’s products.

Winding back to Meta’s F8 developer conference in 2016—alongside advertisers, developers are Meta’s true customers—Zuckerberg explained how the company was actively researching AI vision, language, reasoning, and planning then. In fact, OpenAI had been formed just five months earlier in December 2015, and it would be another year before the now-infamous “Attention in all you need” paper by a Google team sparked today’s LLM craze and AI footrace. And let’s not forget that Meta has worked on some curious—possibly very important—AI work that doesn’t fit into the current AI discussion, notably Cicero and its success in the deep strategy game Diplomacy.

Which is all just to point out that Meta has been making “long-term bets on technologies of the future” that rely on a steady, long-term vision mixing metaverse and AI tech. In our view, LeCunn was simply trying to explain to Davos attendees that some of the eager AI stories pushed by competitors are still far from commercialization.

For our new readers—and those who are still finishing their copy of the Building Moonshots book <wink>—Meta is pursuing a moonshot. Meta doesn’t know if its vision will work to “give everyone in the world the power to share anything” as Zuckerberg first described in 2016. Meta can’t do much of this vision today, but each step gets their teams closer in knowing what will work.

At Davos this year, Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta’s ultimate vision is to achieve AGI. A reporter noted, “None of these companies can clearly define what AGI means—or how they will know they've achieved it.” Yet LeCun’s vision of an AI as smart as a cat shows that his team are already imagining the realistic stepping stones needed to achieve this grander vision.

(If you are curious in understanding more of the state of today’s AI, take a look at an earlier newsletter issue on “How to track tech breakthroughs” that featured AI as an example.)

• Greatly: this section linking the latest news with the Moonshot Ways was an awesome curated set.

• Slightly: sometimes a headline outside my usual watch would catch my eye.

• Nah: I prefer reading your insightful commentary and can read the latest news myself.

• Not applicable: uh, what section?

We always love to hear from our readers, so send us an idea or request any time to hello@buildingmoonshots.com.

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

In this report, Section 3.2 on Breakthrough endeavors stands out against a largely dismal outlook overall for the world. We feel that this “Breakthrough endeavors” section is criminally too short because breakthroughs, as the report authors recognize, offer “game-changing solutions” and “positive tipping point[s]” for changing our risk state. The authors also highlight the role of philanthropists as “a key source of funding for ambitious projects” (we discussed this same point in our December 15 issue).

Moonshots achieve breakthrough innovation, what some call as next-generation solutions. Take the time to read this WEF report section; it’s only two pages long (pgs. 87-89). The section closes by underscoring the long view government leaders need when addressing global risks:

“Policy-makers need to adopt a dual vision, harnessing the power of innovation to address present challenges, while keeping an eye on the future. Investing in breakthrough endeavors is often a long-term bet, involving some degree of risk-taking and failure, but coupled with wins that boost our ability to mitigate or adapt in the face of global risks.”

On this topic of breakthroughs, we are reassured to see news coverage of various breakthroughs underway based on multiple moonshot chases around the world. For example, a recent EuroNews article touted the scientific discovery of the first new antibiotics in over 60 years using AI. This breakthrough, which was also covered by AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), emerged from work by MIT researchers who used AI tools in deep learning to identify a new class of antibiotic candidates. Incidentally, the MIT effort is funded by the “Audacious Project”, which strikes us an effort to spark more moonshot builders, as described:

“Housed at TED, The Audacious Project is a funding initiative that encourages the world’s greatest changemakers to dream bigger. We shape their ideas into viable multi-year plans and launch them to the world alongside visionary philanthropists.”

While MIT researchers were part of the team, it is important to note that this breakthrough isn’t just an “MIT thing” or the work of one exceptional lab. As with all moonshot-class breakthroughs, the collaborators come from a mix of universities, research centers, and global collaborators – including Harvard, the Broad Institute, Integrated Biosciences, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research.

As a final point, alongside these breakthroughs in basic research, other teams and companies are actively delivering tools for applied and transformational researchers to build products. Some recent headlines reveal SandboxAQ acquiring Good Chemistry to make better quantum tools, scientists applying CRISPR tools to the complexity of domesticating new crops, and how genome sequencing may help find unique DNA signatures of common cancers. In short, these groups are the next part of the innovation pipeline, shepherding breakthroughs to the market and broader public.

Perhaps WEF needs to add a report addendum to expand section 3.2 on “Breakthrough endeavors” and reveal those fighting for a brighter future? ;)

GET THE SOURCE

🚀Get your copy of Building Moonshots

Building Moonshots is your handbook for the almost impossible, describing over fifty ways for building big ideas with big impact. Financial Times describes this book as “easily digestible” with “practical insights for extraordinary entrepreneurship”.

Go to book site

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets later in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

🥂 Happy New Year’s! 🥂
We are grateful to all our readers like you. Thanks for reading.

In our last issue, we hinted at a compelling call to action put out recently by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a group funded by tech billionaire Eric Schmidt. Reported by Bloomberg and others, SCSP argues that the US must pursue strategic technological breakthroughs across the compute stack, such as a working quantum computer by 2028, to ensure American security.

The SCSP report stresses the urgent need for moonshot thinking in next-gen computing, stating:

In the long run, supplying ever-increasing compute demand will require revolutionary, not evolutionary, advances in post-Moore’s Law paradigms. Novel compute paradigms are emerging that require us to fundamentally reimagine how computation takes place. [our emphasis added]

They propose a national action plan, outlining six major steps that can build a “flourishing atoms-to-architectures innovation pipeline” – starting with the launch of “National Moonshot Programs” geared for computing breakthroughs, each managed by a “National Mission Manager”. (We can recommend a certain book for building moonshots to these mission managers!)

Two staff members underscored the SCSP report’s points in an opinion piece in MIT Technology Review this week, stating that only the Fed offers the “convening power and R&D dollars to help these novel systems achieve scale.”

SCSP’s plan goes in hand with a similar national call to action by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy, founding directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. They make the case that the US needs a moonshot mentality for AI led by the public sector, stating:

In short, to effect change we need a moonshot mentality. In 2024, we need the government to galvanize a broad investment in AI that reflects America’s bold innovative spirit, backed by strong public-sector infrastructure.

Do you agree that the US needs to provide an institutional home for computing moonshots? And if you’re not an American, how do you feel about this argument?

P.S. If you haven’t yet, check out IBM’s video of its mystical unveiling of the IBM Quantum System Two this month, which embodies their vision of the high-performance systems for the future: quantum-centric supercomputing.

📰Moonshots in the news

This section highlights some recent news articles of moonshot thinking and doing, plus links them to specific Moonshot Ways from the Building Moonshots book. (Note that indented text highlighted by a blue line are direct quotes from each article.)

Meta

December 18, 2023

Living in the future

Meta’s two long-term bets on technologies of the future — AI and the metaverse — each took major steps forward in 2023. And more importantly, they began to intersect.

▶️ Moonshot Way 18: Be visionary

Financial Times

December 29, 2023

Blue sky ideas: deep sea battery minerals attract growing sunk costs

Seabed mining is for intrepid and deep-pocketed investors only… There are several hurdles to commercial production, which could begin in the second half of this decade.

▶️ Moonshot Way 4: Fund for breakthroughs

Seeking Alpha

December 22, 2023

$6 Trillion Black Swan Everyone Forgot

Commercial real estate poses a significant threat to markets in 2024, with over $6 trillion in debt outstanding. Regional banks are particularly exposed to this risk, as they hold half of the outstanding commercial real estate debt… Could this be the black swan event markets aren't pricing in?

▶️ Moonshot Way 8: Collect a menagerie

Tor

December 22, 2023

20 Optimistic Fantasies to Brighten Your TBR Stack

But when the days get darker and colder, sometimes we reach for something that’s more… optimistic. That’s when we turn to cozy, compassionate, and deeply human stories, like the 20 titles below!

▶️ Moonshot Way 6: Be an optimist

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

Almost as a timely retort, Barron’s Penta team offers an example of how philanthropy is part of the critical funding mix. Their writers discuss Iconiq Capital’s model of collaborative philanthropy, featuring climate contributions from philanthropists Benoit and Marie-Florence Dageville. While the Dagevilles have participated in all of the Iconiq co-labs and awards, Marie-Florence noted the family’s interest in funding climate adaptation “because it is the most human-centered pillar.” This Penta article offers insights into how to bring private donors into this dialogue.

Overall, Barron’s Penta articles have been a must-read in our office due to their early and ongoing coverage of groups who are funding the impossible – bold visions that can be seen as moonshots. One notable highlight for us is Penta’s moonshots “triptych” in 2019, which gave early insights into the work that Eric Schmidt’s team continues to lead today:

Penta’s moonshots “triptych” in 2019:

1. Barron’s Penta. (2019, July 26). “What are the world’s next ‘moonshots?” by Abby Schultz.

2. Barron’s Penta. (2019, December 9). “The age of moonshots” by Abby Schultz.

3. Barron’s Penta. (2019, December 9, 2019) “Creating a moonshot culture” by Eric Schmidt and Tom Kalil.

On that note, have you had time to read the Schmidt-backed call for a new national approach for developing microelectronics? Look for our coverage soon, plus notes on how a long-time colleague’s company found itself covered in the report.

🎁Holiday gift idea: Building Moonshots book

Consider giving our Building Moonshots book for the holidays! A great way to supersize someone's thinking.️ 🎁🤓🚀

Industry magnate (and major philanthropist) Andrew Carnegie reputedly stated: "You are what you think. So just think big, believe big, act big, work big, give big, forgive big, laugh big, love big, and live big." Available from any bookstore. #BuildingMoonshots

(And if you want to make our holidays, we welcome more Amazon book reviews!)

📰Moonshots in the news

This section highlights some recent news articles of moonshot thinking and doing, plus links them to specific Moonshot Ways from the Building Moonshots book. (Note that indented text highlighted by a blue line are direct quotes from each article.)

Wall Street Journal

December 9, 2023

Why the U.S. Needs a Moonshot Mentality for AI—Led by the Public Sector

In short, to effect change we need a moonshot mentality. In 2024, we need the government to galvanize a broad investment in AI that reflects America’s bold innovative spirit, backed by strong public-sector infrastructure.

▶️ Moonshot Way 18: Be visionary

Bloomberg

December 14, 2023

The Biggest Problem With Lab-Grown Chicken Is Growing the Chicken

Yet after eight years of toiling away in labs, raising more than $600 million and getting US Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture signoffs to sell its first product, Upside [a food tech startup] has little to show for itself… plans for scaling up have been an evolution saddled with “realities and complexities of doing something that has never been done before. Innovation rarely happens in a straight and continuous line.”

▶️ Moonshot Way 4: Fund for breakthroughs

Financial Times

December 12, 2023

US nuclear start-ups battle funding challenge in race to curb emissions

US plans to build up its nuclear industry face big funding and regulatory challenges which could delay a new generation of smaller, more efficient reactors touted by advocates as critical to fighting climate change.

▶️ Moonshot Way 53: Scale fast and slow

💫 Download your free poster of all 50+ Moonshot Ways

Download a free poster showing all 50+ Moonshot Ways that you can display as personal inspiration, team reminder, or cultural invective.
(print it big on US 11x17 or A3 sized paper)

Download free Moonshots poster

📘Download your free copy of the seminal Foresight Playbook

If you haven’t yet, also download your free copy of the playbook that started it all: our Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Developed from the first decade of courses, research, and insights from Stanford’s University Foresight program, and generously sponsored by the government of Finland’s innovation agency, these foresight tools and mindsets are easy to adopt, quick to apply, and used in thousands of the world’s leading innovation-seeking organizations. (Look for new playbooklets in 2024!)

Download free Foresight Playbook

Maybe you need to track technology breakthroughs for strategic or competitive reasons. Maybe you are trying to understand who the major players are or are personally curious. Whatever the reason, the actual process of tracking tech breakthroughs can feel tricky – especially when you don’t know the tech well.

One technology dominating industry discussions and news headlines lately is generative artificial intelligence (genAI), so let’s use this tech as our example. How can you put the recent news and hype surrounding AI in perspective? Is there an easy way to help your team distill some insights for planning?

The short answer is yes. One tool we recommend is the Four Horizons (4H) model, which we describe in our book Building Moonshots, plus discuss in the last issue on the types of ideas to capture when starting moonshots.

Rely on respected data sources

Ideally, you will draw from a mix of data sources for the 4H model. One regular data source we use is news articles from leading respected publications. (We mean that these sources aim for a fairly-weighted bias and which many leaders frequently trust as credible.) By synthesizing news sources, you can gauge the dominant point of view for any topic or technology. This will give you a baseline.

What are respected sources in the English-speaking world? In business press, top news sources are The Economist, Financial Times, and Bloomberg. In the trade press, consider IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, and Government Technology. In science, go-to sources as a start are Scientific American, Science News, and Science Robotics.

Across various news sources, skim the headlines to quickly gather relevant updates. Then read the articles, seeking keywords within the text that indicate a technology’s development stage. Reporters and experts often offer clues, helping you to determine which development stage and the corresponding innovation horizon. Phrases such as “available” and “profitable” indicate current solutions that sit within horizon 1 (H1). Phrases such as “releasing” and “new market” usually indicate H2, “in the lab” for H3, and “speculative” for H4, and so forth.

The state of AI in early 2020

We worked with an international food company in 2020 to develop an innovation roadmap. The company’s strategy team wanted to better understand AI as one of a dozen technologies that they were tracking having strong potential impact for their business. We started with an overview of the AI landscape.

See the above snapshot of some major news headlines from early 2020, organized by innovation horizon as such:

• In H1, you can see recently announced AI applications for shopping and recruiting.

• In H2, news focuses more on emerging AI efforts in youth education and developing economies.

• In H3, news headlines discuss AI research in areas like facial recognition and network architecture – including growing discussions about a Google Research “Attention” paper.

• At the border of H3 and H4 are DARPA funding grants to push the frontier of AI. At the far edge of H4 are promises of AI to help humans find true love.

A key milestone in the field of AI occurred on June 11, 2020, when OpenAI released an open-source model for commercial use. This moved a research project from H3 experimentation closer to H2 market solutions. Suddenly, AI could be used by managers who did not have specialized computer science training, based on a “text in, text out” interface for arguably any English-based task.

The state of AI today

Fast forward to today. You can apply the same news reading and 4H mapping to track the current state of AI. Here is a snapshot of major news headlines from a few weeks ago – and before the recent drama regarding OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman.

Our Japanese colleagues across academia, industry, and government also want to better understand the AI landscape. Japan is known for its pioneering work in batteries, robotics, hydrogen energy, and other breakthrough tech. We created a joint mapping of AI, showing news headlines from respected Japanese sources at the top and English-speaking sources at the bottom. Just the start of this mapping exercise generated provocative discussion.

We leave it to you to try your own version for your preferred breakthrough tech… let us know how it goes!

Wander and listen

This section highlights some examples of moonshot thinking and doing all around us and links them to specific Moonshot Ways from our Building Moonshots book. (Note that indented text highlighted by a blue line are direct quotes from each article.)

Bloomberg

November 21, 2023

Eric Schmidt’s Think Tank Urges Moonshot Chase to Keep US Ahead

The US must pursue strategic technological breakthroughs, such as a working quantum computer by 2028, to stay ahead of rivals like China and ensure its national security… “This action plan combines bold technology ‘moonshots’ with organizational changes and policies that would position the United States for durable advantage.”

▶️ Moonshot Way 18: Be visionary

Financial Times

November 22, 2023

AI and quantum research at centre of UK science and tech announcements

… the government revealed five “moonshot missions” for its £2.5bn national quantum strategy.

▶️ Moonshot Way 4: Fund for breakthroughs
▶️ Moonshot Way 37: Invest in the future ecosystem

Financial Times

November 21, 2023

Northvolt in new sodium-ion battery breakthrough

Swedish start-up has developed an energy storage technology with no critical minerals including lithium which could minimise reliance on China… It is hoping to provide the first samples to customers next year, and would reach full-scale production by the end of the decade.

▶️ Moonshot Way 24: Be responsible visionaries
▶️ Moonshot Way 35: Double down on breakthroughs

The Economist

November 16, 2023

To supercharge science, first experiment with how it is funded

A growing cadre of scientists, policymakers and philanthropists hopes to revamp science funding… The first step is to try new things. More money could fund promising people rather than specific projects, encouraging researchers to take risks.

▶️ Moonshot Way 54: Play an infinite game

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