Pensamiento Moonshot: Liberando la Innovación para los Desafíos Globales

Getting the first man to the moon was a challenge whose chances of success were remote, yet everyone involved continued to strive to achieve what would be called a "Moonshot".

Today, a "Moonshot" is aiming for a lofty goal, it refers to an innovative project in the technological field with an ambitious goal whose benefits could be enormous for the project's stakeholders, the end users and humanity as a whole. It is an exploratory and pioneering project, based on the "fail fast" philosophy. 

Moonshot thinking consists of choosing a huge, seemingly insurmountable problem and proposing a radical solution using a disruptive technology. The idea is not to seek small incremental improvements, but to aim for a huge improvement or, better yet, to solve the problem altogether. 

Alphabet, Google's parent company, defines a moonshot as a project that: addresses a huge problem affecting billions of people, proposes a radical solution that may seem impossible today, and uses cutting-edge technology that can help create the solution in five to ten years. For Alphabet subsidiary X Development, the goal is to increase the impact of some of the world's biggest problems by a factor of 10, rather than just achieving a 10% improvement, which has become synonymous with the idea of moonshot thinking.

Technology companies are investing more in moonshots. Three examples: 

Bombardier contributes to innovation in Quebec and Canada, thanks to its significant annual investment in Research and Development (R&D). Between 2022 and 2025, Bombardier is forecasting an average of $150 million in R&D activities, which would generate $727 million in GDP over that span, including $652 million in Quebec. Since 2008, the company has helped develop new skills in science, engineering and technical jobs by collaborating with 37 educational institutions to develop innovative projects in cybersecurity for aviation, and AI for pilots.

Rolls Royce has been coordinating research with leading academic institutions and industrial partners for more than 25 years: in 2022 it invested £1.3 billion in R&D, developed 29 University Technology Centers and 7 advanced manufacturing research centers. The company is targeting the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research and Innovation in Europe (ACARE) goals of reducing noise, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and emissions in aircraft. The contribution of the RR engine to these targets is defined as a reduction of CO2 by 30% and a reduction of the NOx certification metric by 75%. Rolls-Royce Holdings' annual research and development expenditures for 2022 were 3.01% higher than in 2021.

By working with government, industrial partners, universities and research institutes, as well as professional associations, we can create the technical solutions that the modern aviation market increasingly needs," said Gergely György Balázs, Managing Director of Rolls-Royce Hungary.

For its part, Formula 1 has made interesting technological contributions. Ferrari F1 proposed to a children's hospital in Great Britain a protocol with sophisticated procedures and coordinated teamwork (as in the Pits) for transferring patients from the operating room to the Intensive Care Unit, which succeeded in reducing error rates from 30% to 10%; McLaren Group was one of the companies that responded to the British government's call to help produce more than 14,000 ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic; and Sainsbury's supermarkets in England use an energy-saving technology co-designed by Williams F1 based on its cars, which in the stores causes cold air to be recycled in the refrigerator, reducing energy use by 15%.

A Bank of America (BofA) Global Research Report entitled "To the Moon(shots)! Future Tech Primer" identifies 14 innovative technologies that moonshots are focused on, including: 6G to address the increasing amount and complexity of data; interfaces that combine human and machine intelligence; emotional artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to new varieties of data; synthetic biology to redesign organisms with enhanced capabilities; bionic humans that could extend human capabilities; and vertical takeoff and landing electric vehicles as alternative transportation in crowded urban areas.

According to the BofA Global Research report, these future technologies have the potential to register a compound average annual growth rate of 36% and become a $6 trillion market by the 2030s.

In short, moonshot thinking benefits companies by empowering people to look for unconventional solutions with a high probability of success, getting teams to use rapid experimentation to learn and continuously improve, getting organizations to look beyond established ways of doing things and assume that anything is possible, and by eliminating the fear of failure and focusing on success.

Moonshot thinking involves daring to invest in far-reaching projects that, over time, become commercial, making them accessible to all and improving people's lives while achieving an attractive rate of return on investment.