ABSTRACT
Creating space for innovation – and indeed capacity building – is an important focus for organisations as everyday work often “gets in the way” for doing the new and uncertain.
Organisational culture is arguably a decisive construct for innovation, but it is also a malleable entity that can both facilitate and hinder. To a large extent, it sets the conditions for innovation. An organisation can work on its structure as well as its culture to make it more supportive of innovation efforts. In addition, it can choose to go beyond existing structures and culture and try to build something new.
In this chapter, we introduce one contemporary entity, the moonshot factory, that is often situated outside existing organisations with their norms and power. This is done with the hope and assumption that this freedom and resources will give moonshot factories the ability to create something different and valuable. In some ways, moonshot factories are a new take on R&D and they are pursued by many high-profile companies today. Although they still belong to the realm of R&D, they are more aspirational and can be seen as a variation of the classic experimental labs of the past, such as Thomas Edison’s Research Laboratory, Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC.
