A simple name for such an ambitious endeavor....

X Development LLC, owned by Google, which in turn is owned by Alphabet Inc is a self-proclaimed "moonshot factory" where some of the craziest ideas for new technology are born. The X lab was where the idea for Google Glass, among many other awesome tech came from. I'll delve more into what projects they have turned into real products in a future part of this series.

Their "blueprint" for such projects starts with a big problem that exists in the world today. They then think up radical new approaches to solving the problem, sometimes flirting with what seems impossible. They then look for new technological breakthroughs that might make it possible to bring that idea to fruition.

They know some of their ideas are crazy, and they're not afraid to fail. Why would they be? They've got Google money, afterall. From the X website:

One of our most important principles is to run as fast as we can at all the hardest parts of a problem, and try to prove that something can’t be done. We want to force ourselves to learn. We actively embrace failure: by making mistakes, we make progress. In this way, our ideas get stronger faster, or we discard them and move on to new ones.

The X team comes up with thousands of ideas, and most get scrapped within hours. Some, however, make it all the way to "graduation", meaning they have either built a whole business around the idea, or it's been aquired by someone else.

Future parts of this post series will cover some projects that have graduated from X, as well as some that are still in development. If you just can't wait, and want to know more about X, visit https://x.company