Safi Bahcall on the necessity of nurturing innovation | Dropbox Blog
In his book Loonshots, Bahcall unpacks a new way of thinking about behavior, culture, and structures to nurture radical breakthroughs. Dropbox caught up with Bahcall to ask how businesses can borrow from science to become the initiators, rather than the victims, of innovative surprise.
Loonshot probably isn’t a term that everyone is familiar with, so could you explain what a loonshot is?
Sure. It’s a wild, crazy idea that is initially dismissed—a champion written off as crazy. Since there wasn’t a good word in the English language for that, I made one up.
What compelled you to fill in that gap in the English language?
If you look at the course of history, the ideas that often had the biggest impact, the ones that changed the course of science, or business, or history, rarely arrived with blaring trumpets, dazzling everybody with their brilliance. They were usually dismissed, ridiculed for many years before they finally arrived and broke through. And there are many examples in the business, political, or military worlds. It’s very easy, for instance, to declare something a “moonshot.” That’s become a popular thing to say, which traces back to Kennedy. President John Kennedy in 1962 said, “Let’s put a man on the moon.” That’s a big goal, something that everybody gets behind. And you can think of a moonshot as a destination, but nurturing those crazy ideas, those ones that everybody dismissed is how you get to that destination.
So it’s easy to talk about a big destination, but how you actually get there is you need to nurture those small crazy ideas. A moonshot is announcing a big goal. But a loonshot is those crazy ideas that end up getting you to that goal. And if you’re a team or a company or a nation, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to those loonshots. And you asked why did I use that term or invent that term, because there wasn’t a good phrase or term that captured that concept. So I struggled around for a while and just said, “Ah, what the hell.” The publisher didn’t like it but I was like, “Yeah, I’m just going to go with it,” and so that’s that.
Were there any other terms on a short list?
No. There were phrases to describe the concept, but it’s not as good as if you have a single word just to capture the idea. And I think quite a few people in the publishing industry said to me, “No, you shouldn’t use it because you see, here’s what’s going to happen. Your book is going to come out and then we have this thing called a sales force and they’re going to call up book stores and they’re going to say, ‘We have this new title.’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, what’s the title?’ They’ll say, ‘It’s Loonshots.’ ‘Oh you mean, Moonshots?’ ‘No, it’s Loonshots.’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s got an L not an M.’ ‘What?’ And it’ll take them at least 20 seconds to explain and you don’t want that 20 seconds.” I’m like, “Really? That’s the answer because your sales force is going to need another couple of seconds to explain there’s an L not an M, and you think that’s the big problem? Ha, I’m not so sure that’s such a big problem.” So we had those kinds of discussions a few times. It ended up being fine.
But no, actually I didn’t know at the time. In and of itself, it’s a crazy idea to make up a random word and make it your title. So I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was worth a chance.
If loonshots are so impactful, why have we ignored them for so long?
Well, I don’t think I’m the first guy to say that a lot of important ideas were neglected for a while. But what I do in the book is a combination of physics, business, and history, and I think that is kind of unusual. I’m a theoretical physicist by training and then I entered into the business world maybe 20 some years ago. I don’t think it’s a new idea that important projects get neglected or things that end up changing the world get neglected. In hindsight, that is quite easy to see, because as I … I think I called it the “three deaths of the loonshot.”