Episode 3: Impossible Goals - Lessons Learned from 3 Innovation “Barriers”

In my second series of articles, I address some lessons I’ve learned from what, on the surface, seemed like impediments. At the time, these issues appeared to be roadblocks that were stifling progress and innovation.??I’ve since come to see them as tools to help break traditional modes of thinking on development and innovation.??

The first article in this series highlighted Unreasonable Deadlines (you can read it here).

The second article in this series focused on Inadequate Resources .

The last article in this series explores the “barrier” of Impossible Goals.

Setting Goals Beyond Reach

It is easy to forget that many things we accept today as settled science were once considered impossible.?Feats as diverse as landing a man on the moon, a mass-market all-electric car, a battery-powered supercomputer that fits in your pocket (the modern smartphone), or genetically modified crops for human consumption all would have been considered unthinkable 20 or 30 years prior to their first introduction to the world.?Yet at some point along the line, a group of people thought “what if we could…?” and set in motion events that would change the world.

When we approach innovation projects, however, we often scope our projects to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.?One reason for taking this approach is minimizing risk.?Babe Ruth held the career home run record that stood for 39 years.?He also held a strikeout record that stood for 30 years.?To extend the baseball analogy, if you’re going to swing that hard, you’re going to have your share of misses. Many modern organizations prioritize “not failing” over “succeeding” because of the financial costs and lack of predictability associated with trying something truly audacious and falling short.

Certainly, any innovation portfolio should include more predictable, safer projects that will generate additional revenue or improve operational efficiency.?But by avoiding “home run swings” there are insights and lessons that are going undiscovered.?Here is an instance of shooting for Impossible Goals, and the lessons it imparted.

The L Prize Lamp

You may have heard of the “X Prize”, a science “competition” that started in 1996 with a goal of reusable sub-orbital space flight and has since progressed into a wide range of pursuits to better humanity and the planet. ?The “L Prize” program was implemented by the Department of Energy to spur innovation in LED Lighting in 2007, leveraging public awareness of the X Prize.?The 60W incandescent replacement lamp L Prize was won by Philips.?This isn’t a story about that lamp, but the “21st Century Lamp”, an unrestricted L Prize category with specifications that, at the time, appeared impossible.

I worked on the team at Cree that eventually met that specification.?(Due to a quirk in Federal funding, the “prize” was never awarded.)?The purpose of completing the competition wasn’t to launch the product – it was to stretch the industry’s collective understanding of what was possible.?Every element of the design – the materials and chips used for the LEDs, the optical materials, the thermal design, and the electrical design required performance that “was impossible” using typical methods.

LED power supplies typically operate and tens of volts.?But the most efficient power supplies run at hundreds of volts.?What if we could use one of those?

LED lighting at the time used a few relatively large chips to make manufacturing easier.?What if we could use over a hundred much smaller, more efficient chips??

Asking “what if we could” was a precursor to almost all of our breakthroughs.

White light LEDs use blue chips with green and red phosphors to create white light.?But red phosphors are inefficient.?Could we use red LEDs in place of red phosphors to make the system more efficient?

Red LEDs get less efficient as they get hotter.?What could we do that would keep those temperatures as close to room temperature as possible?

Achieving the big goal wasn’t enabled by any “one thing” – but required many smaller, compounded innovations.?

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The optical system we developed for the 21st Century Lamp was NOT something that could be mass produced – it was hand-crafted.?Solving the technical challenge (does it do the job) was good enough for the purposes of our exercise.?

Nearly every advance made to achieve the “impossible” goal required building prototype after prototype, the vast majority of which were failures.

Reframing failure as “learning what doesn’t work” (Thomas Edison paraphrase) was essential to achieving something great.

Do you think that setting Impossible Goals can be a useful method for spurring innovation, or it is a barrier to progress??Let me know what you think!