There are few people more qualified to talk about shaping the future than Google’s Astro Teller. His official title the oh-so-Googley “Captain of Moonshots.” His day job is running Google X, which the company calls its “moonshot factory.” It’s where Google GOOG -0.30% is developing self-driving cars, Glass (its glasses-like wearable computer), Loon (a project to deliver Internet access worldwide through high-altitude balloons), Makani (an effort to generate energy through high-flying wind turbines), and ingestible nanoparticles that would detect cancer and other diseases. Teller works closely with CEO Larry Page, which Fortune named 2014 businessperson of the year, and Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder who oversees X and other special projects. He recently spoke with Fortune about his lab’s approach to breakthrough innovation.

    Fortune: How do moon shots come together at Google X?

    Well, with the caveat that it’s not simple, I think that there are some principles, or some ways of seeing, at least, things that don’t work.

    You have to have three things in order for it to conceptually be a moon shot. That doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily do it, but it means necessarily we won’t do it if it doesn’t have these three things.

    The first one is that it’s a huge problem. That sounds pretty obvious, but it’s incredibly not obvious in fact.

    Then the second thing is that there has to be some kind of radical proposed solution. It should be a science fiction-sounding product or service. Obviously whether it really sounds like it comes out of [Isaac] Asimov isn’t important. What’s important is that we be not treading the same ground that other people have tread before because thinking that we’re going to be smarter or better resourced or work harder than people who’ve come before us is just not a good bet.

    Then the third one is some reason to believe that this isn’t just pie in the sky. We would call this breakthrough science or tech.

    This could be something we’ve discovered. It could be something someone else has discovered. It could be something that has worked in one domain but has never been transplanted to this other domain. There are lots of different ways of ending up having an “Aha!” moment where you believe that something looks nearly impossible might not be impossible.

    These three things don’t happen all at once, right?

    That’s right. So in some cases one of these is easy and the others are hard. Sometimes we will think we have a bead on two or even three of these things, but after awhile one of them will fall away.

    Take Loon [the Google X project to deliver Internet connectivity worldwide through high-altitude balloons], for example. This was super obvious. There are 5 billion people in the world who don’t have Internet connections, and there’s very little that would cause the world to be more at peace, more prosperous than getting the other 5 billion people on the planet connected.

    Very generally, doing this from balloons rather than from satellites sort of has the form of a radical solution.

    And so we went through a process for almost a year where the mantra was not “This is going to work” but “This is not going to work. How can we discover why this won’t work as fast as possible so that we can discard this and move on to something else?” And it was only having tried rigorously for a year and having failed to fail many times in a row that we got to the point where we were starting to take this project really seriously.

    You have a rapid-eval team. Can you talk a little bit about how it works?

    There are two ends of a continuum [for tackling moon shots]. On one end of the continuum—you could just call this the “savant” model—you pick a small number of things to do, and you’re determined to do them from the beginning, and you’d better be right because you decided you’re going to do them. On the other end of the spectrum—you could think of this as the “funnel” perspective—at the beginning you have a huge number of things that you’re not taking very seriously and that you’re hoping to throw out with relatively little work. And the farther you get into the funnel, the more work it may take to throw out something.

    So this is a team of maybe eight or so polymaths who are exceptionally bright over a broad range. They tend to be makers, so they are not uncomfortable prototyping. They’re run by a guy named Rich DeVaul. They act in a fairly chamber music-like way, where for each thing that someone is working on, everyone else will just pitch in.

    And then Rich DeVaul also runs the Design Kitchen for us, which is sort of a tech shop on steroids. It’s a rapid prototyping facility, and it makes sense that these two things are together.

    With Larry Page, you’ve got your savant, too.

    Well, we have both, right? We are very fortunate to be in a situation where two of the planet’s recognized savants, Larry and Sergey, are here. There are times when they say, “Trust me on this one.” And that does skip parts of the funnel process. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t otherwise driving the funnel process.

    Is there a way to institutionalize or scale this process? How far can it scale?

    We clearly have scaled in the sense that there’s a lot more going on here than there was two years ago. I do believe that making a factory for innovation, a moon-shot factory, is possible. I’m not saying that we’ve done a perfect job here so far, but I do think that that’s possible.

    你有一个快速评估团队。能介绍一下它是如何运作的吗？

    [就处理“登月”项目来说，]这就像一个统一体的两端。你可以把其中一端称为“专家”模式。它的做法是挑几件事来做，而且从一开始就决心一干到底。你得做出正确的选择，因为你已经下定了决心。对于另一端，你可以把它想象成一个“漏斗”。在漏斗顶部有大量的项目，我们并不打算去特别认真地对待，而且我们也希望在排除这些项目时投入较少的精力；然而，越接近漏斗底部，排除就越费力。

    这个团队大约有八个人，他们大都博学多才，而且在众多领域都颇有建树。他们更愿意动手参与，因此制作原始模型对他们来说不是什么难事。该团队的负责人是里奇•德沃尔。他们的工作方式类似于室内合奏——当有人在从事某一项目时，其他人都会为其提供一臂之力。

    里奇•德沃尔还负责我们的Design Kitchen项目，这是个加强版的技术工作室。它能迅速制作出原始模型，因此让里奇同时掌管Design Kitchen和Google X是合情合理的。

    有了拉里•佩奇，你也就有了自己的专家。

    我们有两位专家，不是吗？我们非常幸运，作为这个星球上公认的专家，拉里和谢尔盖都在这儿。有时候他们会说：“在这个问题上要相信我。”而这确实能帮我们省略一部分“漏斗”工作。但这并不意味在其他时候我们不开展这项工作。

    有办法让这项工作成为制度或者扩大规模吗？它的规模能有多大？

    很明显，我们已经扩大了规模，因为和两年前相比，现在我们这里进行的项目要多得多。我确实相信，建立一个创新工厂，也就是“登月”工厂，是可行的。这并不是说到现在为止我们的工作已趋于完美，但我真的认为它是可行的。（财富中文网）

    译者：Charlie

    审稿：李翔