Larry Page and Sergey Brin may have become the technology industry's forgotten men since stepping back from the limelight in the last few years. Their impact on innovation, within Google in particular, is momentous — and has been underpinned by a specific philosophy that shaped so many ventures courtesy of the Moonshot Factory.

Reaching for new heights

Moonshot is often used to describe the efforts to achieve a highly ambitious, but not entirely impossible, challenge and has its origins in the space race in the mid-20th century. Larry Page, writing in the foreword for American investor John Doerr's 2018 book What Matters, outlined the principle that drove so much achievement at Google.

Use of a similar phrasing can be first traced to American author Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars", and, of course, Page has applied his own twist – but the meaning remains the same.

The comment speaks to committing to one's ambitions with the intention of success, where failure still means achieving something that is conventionally seen as difficult to accomplish in the first instance.

Page, at the time, was Alphabet's serving CEO but was scaling back his public profile before announcing he would step back completely in December 2019.

Breakneck innovation

Page's comment speaks to committing to one's ambitions with the intention of success, where failure still means reaching a great height conventionally seen as hard to accomplish.

There is no organization that embodies these values more suitably than Google's own X, the Moonshot Factory. Founded in 2010, it's been at the heart of some of the most exciting projects the industry has seen.

Among the most successful projects include the Waymo, self-driving car technology venture which is growing from strength to strength, as well as more unusual projects like Malta, in which energy in the form of molten salt and chilled liquid is stored in giant tanks.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet is a freelance contributor for Tech Radar and the Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.