By Rory Sutherland, Market Watch; May 28, 2019
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, runs a division that is now simply called X with the single aim of developing what the company calls moonshots.
A moonshot is not the same as an innovation; it is something much more ambitious, a silver bullet. Instead of pursuing change by increments, it aims to change something by a factor of 10 (for which the Roman numeral is X). For instance, Alphabet X GOOG, +0.07% GOOGL, +0.04% funds research into driverless cars, with the explicit aim of reducing road fatalities by at least 90%, making roads 10 times safer.