Google X Executives Spin Giant Prize Wheels To Plan Future Moonshots
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — In a major summit this morning, a group of Google X executives convened to begin planning out their next transformative “moonshot” projects. The first step? Spinning two giant prize wheels and watching what ideas they land on.
After disembarking from their brightly colored Gbikes, the executives congregated in a conference room called “Room Of Requirement,” where the two wheels sat at the front of the room. One wheel’s multicolored prize slots were filled with transformative technologies — “DEEP LEARNING,” “CRISPR,” and “BLOCKCHAIN,” for example, while the other wheel was emblazoned with big problem areas like “MEDICINE,” “INSURANCE,” and “ENERGY.”
The group then spun the wheels simultaneously, waited for them to tick slowly to a stop, and then began to debate whether or not to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to work on project ideas like “NANOTECHNOLOGY for FASHION.” The founders of Google were intimately involved in the planning process: Sergey Brin spun the wheel of technologies and Larry Page spun the wheel of problems.
Google X began using prize wheels for ideation after identifying the need for a rigorous process to decide how best to spend billions of dollars on moonshots while still retaining the dynamism of a R&D group. After observing how many startups in Silicon Valley described themselves as “Uber for laundry” or “Dropbox for enterprise,” X’s leadership decided to adopt the spinning of the prize wheels as a scalable replacement for their previous project selection method of throwing darts at a board with ideas written on it.
Some projects have emerged from the lab with some degree of success, like Loon’s genesis from “BALLOONS for INTERNET” and Waymo’s “ROBOTS for DRIVING.” Other projects have been less successful. Google Glass originated from a roll of “WEARABLE COMPUTERS for YOUR FACE,” although some of the executives will still stridently defend the project as “sounding like a good idea at the time.”
As the summit concluded, the executives strapped on roller blades and waddled to a volleyball court outside of the building that was stocked with a set of Google Chrome branded volleyballs. “Quick check, is the geyser of ad revenue still going?” asked one executive. “Yes? Ok then, set the volleyball.”
