There have been no shortage of books on innovation over the years, whether in terms of extolling its importance or advising organizations on how to do so more effectively. It’s a pretty crowded market for biotech entrepreneur Safi Bahcall to enter therefore, yet enter he has with Loonshots, his exploration of how the transformative ideas that innovators so often strive for can be achieved.

Bahcall dips into a wide range of fields, from history to physics, and the book is littered with a wide range of engaging stories that make it a very easy and entertaining read. His thesis rests on the notion that for ‘loonshots’ to succeed, three conditions need to be met.

Firstly, the people involved in striving for these transformative innovations have to be distinct and separate from what he refers to as the ‘franchise group’, who you could aptly describe as business as usual, or those for whom innovations are of the more iterative variety.

That should not mean that the two groups act completely independently of each other however, for his second condition is that there is a seamless exchange of information, ideas and even people between the two groups.

The third, and final condition, is for the loonshot group to be sufficiently large for any innovations that emerge from it to develop and scale up such that they achieve mass market success.

Loonshot or franchise thinking?

All of which is reasonably hard to dispute, my only problem is whether this represents especially new thinking.  The idea of a skunkworks has existed for decades, and people from John Kotter to Vijay Govindarajan have explored the best way to structure organizations for innovation, and especially how to manage the dual goals of creating breakthrough innovations whilst still maintaining the cash cow that inevitably funds the business.

That’s not to say that Loonshots is not worthy, and it does provide an entertaining and story-packed journey through the challenges involved in supporting and nurturing breakthrough innovations, merely that the general thesis has largely been explored elsewhere already.

If you haven’t already read work by Kotter or Govindarajan, then Loonshots is a nice introduction to the topic that outlines a top level strategy for developing a structure that supports both iterative and transformative innovation within the organization.  If you want a more detailed analysis of the issues involved in doing this however, then personally I would go with Govindarajan’s The Other Side of Innovation and The Three-Box Solution, both of which give a more tactical insight into the numerous challenges involved in doing so successfully.