CRAZY, UNLOVED BUT POTENTIALLY TRANSFORMATIONAL – WHAT’S IN YOUR LOONSHOT NURSERY?
RITA MCGRATH
Author Safi Bahcall introduced the term “loonshots” to describe ventures with gamechanging potential that nobody thought would work and whose champions were ridiculed. Which raises the question of how you keep the crazy ideas alive long enough to realize their potential?
01
The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose
Great new ideas, and terrible new ideas,
champions are often written off as crazy.
unfortunately are almost identical at birth. This is why author, entrepreneur and biotech 02
Large groups of people are needed to translate
CEO Safi Bahcall has suggested an important those breakthroughs into technologies that win dynamic for innovating organizations. wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. These are:
JANUARY 2020
Here is an example:
The long and tortured history of overnight successes
RITA MCGRATH
Famous entrepreneur James Dyson began working on his iconic vacuum cleaner in 1979. Frustrated, he would later say, by the ineffectiveness of even the best vacuum cleaners of the day, he was inspired by the cyclonic separators used in industrial sawmills. He spent five years doing nothing but creating and testing prototypes (5,127 of them), supported by his wife, who taught art. Today, his company is worth billions but is still privately held as he doesn’t believe being a public company would allow the patience he believes breakthroughs require.
Slack resources that can follow the talent At the earliest stages of an innovation, the true believers in an idea need to be passionate, patient and perseverant. They benefit from having access to slack resources which are not optimized around delivering a specific output efficiently. They benefit from having multiple resources pools that they can appeal to, and multiple paths to receiving funding. The companies that benefit from their initiative often have a “follow the talent” approach to providing access to resources. RITA MCGRATH
Making modest resources available to the “edges” Loonshots, Bahcall points out, would almost certainly be killed by the existing approval structures of most corporate investment evaluation structures. This is why smart innovators figure out how to get the people with ideas access to resources without approvals required from people who are embedded in the current paradigm.
RITA MCGRATH
https://thoughtsparks.substack.com/