At the Rails, home to Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” I once found myself standing in line for Indian food with Sergey Brin in front of me and Astro Teller behind me.
The Rails was no ordinary tech building. It was a place where ideas were birthed, killed, and sometimes launched into the stratosphere. Think Waymo and Wing. To find myself wedged between two of the most recognizable names in moonshot innovation felt electric, like I was standing in a current of unlimited potential.
And then, a strange thing happened: the butter chicken felt more familiar than the presence of these two tech icons in line with me.
Astro turned and asked casually, “Hello, Salima. What are you going to eat?”
And suddenly it hit me: I am in line with these guys.
The difference between a wide-eyed spectator and a moonshot maker isn’t as big or as real as we’ve been told.
That realization stayed with me during my years inside Alphabet’s Other Bets ecosystem. From self-driving technology to AI to drone delivery, I watched how moonshots were imagined, resourced, tested, and scaled. I saw the power of radical ambition up close.
But I also came to another realization: Traditional moonshots, while ambitious, aren’t ambitious enough.
They have produced extraordinary breakthroughs. But many still emerge from a relatively narrow architecture of invention—one rooted in the same geographies, assumptions, feedback loops, and systems of power.
The next leap in moonshots will require something else.
I often think about the Bush Pump in Zimbabwe.
Made of steel and mounted on concrete slabs, the Bush Pump used a simple lever to draw water from aquifers deep below the Earth’s surface. By the 1970s, Zimbabwean engineers and public health officials had transformed it into a durable, repairable system built from local materials and maintainable by the very communities using it.
Its simplicity was its brilliance.
No specialized parts. No imported expertise. A farmer could fix it. A teacher could manage it. Local workshops could fabricate components, and communities oversaw installation and upkeep themselves.
Over time, tens of thousands of Bush Pumps spread across rural Zimbabwe, becoming national infrastructure that improved lives at scale.
So is the Bush Pump a moonshot?
Most people imagine moonshots as billion-dollar laboratories, advanced AI systems, or rockets piercing the atmosphere. But transformative innovation does not always emerge from elite institutions. Sometimes it emerges from lived necessity, local ingenuity, and systems designed in direct relationship with human realities.
At Alphabet, I saw the inverse.
I saw what becomes possible when extraordinary talent, infrastructure, computation, and capital are concentrated together. But I also saw how easily moonshots can become calibrated toward the worlds already closest to them.
North American markets. High-bandwidth environments. Clean technological contexts. Users already integrated into advanced digital systems.
The result is extraordinary innovation that can still miss vast terrains of human possibility.
A moonshot without lived intelligence is blind.
And lived ingenuity without scale is a tragedy of untapped potential.
This is where I believe the future of innovation is headed: toward what I call third-space moonshots.
These moonshots do not emerge from technological bravado alone, nor from grassroots ingenuity in isolation. They arise from the convergence of both.
The village and the lab. The ancestor and the algorithm. The engineer and the lived system.
For the first time in history, we have the technological capability to connect planetary-scale tools with the intelligence already active across billions of lives and communities. The next generation of breakthroughs won’t simply improve existing systems. They will unlock entirely new ecosystems of opportunity.
The question is no longer whether technology will shape the future.
It is whether we are willing to expand who gets to shape technology.
What if the most powerful moonshots haven’t been built yet — not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because we’ve been confined by inherited assumptions about who gets to invent?
What if the next great moonshot builder is not already inside Silicon Valley?
What if the future’s most important breakthroughs emerge from entirely different terrains of intelligence, ambition, and lived experience?
The world is no longer simply a market to scale into.
It is a partner in invention.
And the next era of moonshots will belong to those capable of building accordingly.
Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Invent Now: The Next Leap in Moonshots by Salima Bhimani, PhD. Copyright © 2026 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.