5 Questions That Spot Breakthroughs Before They Happen

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney - A Show About Ideas Creativity And Innovation

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In October 1903, The New York Times published an editorial mocking the idea of human flight, stating that a successful flying machine might take “from one to ten million years” to develop through the efforts of mathematicians and engineers.

Eight weeks later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, controlled flight over the beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, proving the skeptics wrong.

The smartest people in the world got this catastrophically wrong. What does that tell us about impossibility itself?

Every industry has billion-dollar opportunities hiding behind a single word: impossible. And most executives never see them coming because they've been trained to accept limitations that don't actually exist.

The Innovation Reality Check

If the smartest experts can be so wrong about something as fundamental as human flight, then we need to completely rethink how we evaluate impossibility. The problem isn't that impossible things become possible. The problem is that we're terrible at recognizing what's actually impossible versus what just looks impossible.

What Innovation Actually Means

Innovation is simply an idea made real. Not brilliant concepts sitting in notebooks. Actual stuff you can touch. Use. Buy. Experience.

Leonardo da Vinci invented flying machines in the 15th century. The Wright brothers innovated flight in 1903.

What's the difference? Da Vinci had amazing ideas that stayed ideas. The Wright brothers made the idea real.

This distinction changes everything about impossible innovation. Has someone successfully transformed an “impossible” idea into a tangible reality? Then logically, it was never truly impossible. We just lacked the knowledge, tools, or perspective to make it happen.

Those dismissed breakthroughs floating around your industry right now? They aren't abstract fantasies. They're concrete challenges waiting for someone to develop the right knowledge, tools, and perspective.

The Three Types of Impossibility

Not all impossibilities are created equal. Three distinct categories:

Logical Impossibility: Things that contradict themselves by definition. Married bachelors. Square circles.

But even these sometimes dissolve when we reframe the question. Negative numbers? Logically impossible for centuries. Until merchants needed to describe debt, scientists needed to measure temperatures below freezing. Suddenly, those “impossible” numbers became essential tools.

Physical Impossibility: Things that appear to violate natural laws. Quantum mechanics would've been physically impossible under 19th-century physics. Today, we're building quantum computers using those “impossible” principles.

Practical Impossibility: Ideas that don't violate logic or physics—they're just beyond our current capabilities. Commercial fusion power. Artificial general intelligence. Reversing human aging.

Most breakthrough innovations emerge from this third category. They represent temporary constraints. Not permanent barriers.

Here's what nobody talks about: the companies that get blindsided by “impossible” innovations aren't stupid. They're victims of expertise. The more you know about an industry, the harder it becomes to see past its false limitations.

Everyone says innovation requires thinking outside the box. That's backwards.

The biggest breakthroughs come from questioning the box itself. Not thinking outside your industry's limitations—questioning whether those limitations are real.

When I took over as CTO at HP, our PC division was hemorrhaging money. Three to five billion dollars a year in losses. Dead last in market share. Everyone inside the company believed there was no room to innovate in PCs. Too commoditized. Too mature. Impossible to differentiate.

That belief? Complete nonsense.

We took that division from massive losses to five billion in profits. From last place to number one global market share. How? By introducing innovations that everyone else in the industry said were impossible.

Missing these patterns doesn't just cost market share. It costs entire business models. I've watched billion-dollar companies become footnotes because they couldn't see past their own expertise.

The tools I'm sharing today came from that experience. And dozens of others like it.

But what if I told you there's a way to cut through all this industry BS in less than five minutes? What if claims about what can't be done could be systematically dismantled with just the right questions?

The Five-Question Reality Check

These questions cut through industry BS faster than anything else I've seen. They force you to get specific about dismissive claims instead of accepting them at face value. They separate real barriers from fake ones.

The Framework That Changes Everything

When the industry consensus calls something a fantasy, don't dismiss it automatically. Run it through the Reality Check.

Question 1: What makes this seem undoable specifically? Don't accept vague claims. Push for precise limiting factors.

Electric vehicles seemed undoable because “batteries will always be heavy, expensive, and short-range.” That assumption? Turned out to be temporary.

Question 2: Which type of impossibility are we dealing with? Apply our three-category framework. Ideas that seem logically impossible might just need conceptual reframing. Practical limitations often just need enabling technologies to mature.

Question 3: What knowledge would make this possible? Work backward from success. If this dismissed idea actually became real, what specific breakthroughs would've been necessary? Which are already happening in adjacent fields?

Question 4: Who benefits from keeping this “impossible”? Consider motivations carefully. Sometimes dismissive claims protect existing interests. They don't reflect genuine technical reality.

Question 5: Are different technologies starting to connect? Innovation happens when separate advances suddenly align. Multiple technologies. Multiple trends. All at once.

Case Study: SpaceX and the Reality Check

When Elon Musk announced plans to dramatically reduce launch costs in the early 2000s, asking the five questions would've revealed everything you needed to know.

Question 1: Launch costs had remained around $10,000 per kilogram for decades. Everyone said this was fundamental physics.

Question 2: This was a practical limitation. Not a fundamental barrier.

Question 3: Knowledge gaps were in precision landing, rapid refurbishment, and manufacturing at scale. All solvable engineering problems.

Question 4: Established aerospace contractors had massive incentives to maintain the expensive status quo. Their entire business model depended on it.

Question 5: Multiple conditions were converging. Advanced computing. New materials science. Private capital availability.

The five questions revealed that launch cost reduction was a practical limitation waiting for engineering solutions. By 2024? SpaceX reduced costs by over 90 percent.

The impossible became routine.

Those questions work perfectly—once someone mentions a dismissed breakthrough. However, the real competitive advantage lies in spotting these opportunities while your competitors are still dismissing them as fantasy. And that requires something most executives completely overlook.

Training Your Detection Instincts

That requires something different. Not just analysis tools, but detection systems. And most companies get this completely wrong. They think it's about having better technology scouts or attending more conferences. It's not. It's about rewiring how your organization processes dismissed ideas.

Two Essential Exercises

The foundation of any detection system is people who think differently about what's possible. Start here – with two exercises that change how your team processes industry blind spots.

Exercise 1: The Time Traveler's Memo. Imagine you're writing from 2034 back to yourself today. One dismissed innovation from your industry has completely transformed business.

Write a detailed memo covering:

What was the breakthrough that seemed undoable?
Why did experts dismiss it so confidently?
What early warning signs did everyone ignore?
What would you do differently today knowing this outcome?

This forces you to think like your future disrupted self looking backward. Instead of your present expert self looking forward.

Exercise 2: The War Room Session
This is where you harness collective intelligence to break through dismissive assumptions. When you get diverse perspectives in one room, systematically challenging what your industry calls fantasy, patterns emerge that no individual could see alone.

Three hours. Diverse team. Three columns on a wall:

“Industry calls this undoable”
“Technologies that might enable it”
“Who might be working on this right now”

The magic happens when you connect insights across these columns. Suddenly, you'll see that your industry's “fantasy” challenge is actually someone else's current research project.

How to Run the War Room: The Five-Phase Process

Start with the obvious stuff. Phase one is just brainstorming – thirty minutes of everything your industry says can't be done. Don't filter anything.

Now dig deeper. Phase two takes sixty minutes to research what would need to be true for each idea to work. Adjacent fields. Emerging technologies. Connection patterns.

Time to get specific. Phase three is forty-five minutes, identifying who might be tackling these problems. Research groups. Startups. Tech giants. Government initiatives.

This is where it gets interesting. Phase four takes thirty minutes to draw connections between columns. Which dismissed ideas share enabling technologies? Which have the most active research happening behind the scenes?

The moment of truth. Phase five is fifteen minutes of team voting. Most likely to become real within 5 years. The biggest threat to the current business model. Most significant opportunity for new revenue.

The output isn't predictions. It's intelligence about where to pay attention.

These exercises reveal incredible insights. But there's something even more powerful that most companies never build. Something that works even when you're drowning in quarterly reviews and daily fires.

How to Spot Dismissed Ideas Before They Disrupt You

Most companies run these exercises once, get excited about the insights, then go back to quarterly business reviews and forget everything they learned. Six months later? They're blindsided by exactly the innovations they identified. The solution isn't doing more exercises. It's building simple systems that keep running even when you're not paying attention.

Building a Simple Detection System

Individual evaluation is just the beginning. Organizations that win consistently? They've built simple systems for discovering breakthrough innovations while competitors still call them fantasies.

The first place to look might surprise you. Universities.

Universities are where professors tackle dismissed problems without quarterly pressure. Set up relationships with three to five research institutions. Not your industry's obvious schools. Places where enabling technologies are developing.

Retail executives should be talking to robotics labs. Healthcare leaders should be monitoring materials science programs. Energy companies should be watching quantum computing research.

What actually works:

Monthly calls with key researchers
Annual events where academics present early-stage work
Student internship programs for early insight into research directions
Budget roughly $50,000 annually per institution for meaningful relationships

Next, follow the smart money. Serious capital flowing toward dismissed technologies? That signals something's changing.

Track which venture capitalists are funding “fantasy” innovations in adjacent spaces. Follow their portfolio companies. When Kleiner Perkins started funding fusion energy startups, that was intelligence about practical limitations becoming investment reality.

Simple systems that work:

Google alerts for funding announcements in related fields
Subscribe to venture capital newsletters
Attend pitch events where breakthrough ideas get presented
Pattern recognition develops over time

Finally, the pattern that changed everything for us. Outsider perspectives.

People trained in your industry's limitations can't see past them. Bring in outsiders who haven't learned what's “undoable” yet.

Recent graduates from different fields. Entrepreneurs who've solved problems dismissed in other industries. Consultants with cross-industry pattern recognition.

What works:

Set up quarterly advisory sessions with 3-4 people from entirely different industries. Rotate one person out every quarter to keep perspectives fresh. Give them your toughest challenges upfront and ask them to approach it like problems in their own fields.
Run focused innovation challenges where you present outsiders with one specific “undoable” problem. Give them background context, but don't explain why it's dismissed. Set a tight deadline – 48 hours works well. You'll be amazed at what solutions emerge when people haven't learned the constraints.
Create a simple system to capture outsider questions. When someone asks, “Why don't you just…” about something everyone knows is undoable, write it down immediately. Review these questions monthly. Half will be naive, but the other half will reveal assumptions you didn't know you had.

Additional Detection Methods

Depending on your industry and organization, you might also want to systematically monitor patent filings in adjacent fields or designate specific people to champion breakthrough ideas instead of shooting them down. The key is starting with these three core approaches, then adding layers as you see what works.

That's exactly how we dominated at HP. An organized way of watching for breakthroughs, while competitors relied on intuition and luck.

You can start building the same advantage this week. But the clock is already ticking.

Your Action Plan

While we've been talking about frameworks and systems, someone in your industry is already working on what everyone calls fantasy. The question isn't whether breakthrough innovation will blindside your market—it's whether you'll be the disruptor or the disrupted.

Start This Week – Five Immediate Actions

Don't wait for organizational buy-in or perfect systems. Start with these immediate actions you can take personally:

First action this week: Apply the Reality Check to one idea your industry calls fantasy. Spend 30 minutes. Get specific about limiting factors.

Your second move: Identify and contact two universities doing research in adjacent fields. Make the phone calls.

Third step: Set up three Google alerts for venture capital funding in technologies related to your industry's dismissed challenges.

Fourth action: Spend one hour searching patent databases for recent applications related to your industry's “undoable” problems. Document who's filing what.

Fifth and final step: Schedule conversations with two people from completely different fields. Ask them about your industry's toughest challenges.

Then Scale What Works

Once you start seeing results from these five actions, scale the ones that work best across your organization. Personal insights become a systematic advantage.

The goal isn't perfection. It's momentum. These five actions this week create intelligence about breakthrough innovations becoming possible.

Every industry has someone working on what everyone else calls fantasy right now. The question isn't whether breakthrough innovation will happen. It's whether you'll recognize it while it's still called fantasy, or after it disrupts everything you thought you knew.

Innovations Cannot Be Impossible

Innovation cannot actually be undoable. If someone makes an idea real, it was never truly undoable. We just lacked the knowledge, tools, or perspective.

Every dismissed idea floating around your industry represents a potential breakthrough. Someone is going to acquire the necessary knowledge to make it happen.

The competitive advantage goes to people who identify which dismissed ideas are knowledge gaps rather than permanent barriers.

The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics. Not aviation experts. Steve Jobs was a college dropout. Not a computer engineer. We achieved what the PC industry giants called fantasy because we questioned assumptions entire industries had stopped questioning.

Your industry's next transformation is already being developed by someone who doesn't accept the current dismissive consensus.

Will you recognize it while it's still called fantasy? Or after it disrupts everything you thought you knew?

But let me end with a prediction. There's one breakthrough I'm convinced we'll see in our lifetime: molecular-scale medical robots.

Programmable nanobots that live in your bloodstream permanently. Providing real-time health monitoring and instant medical intervention. They could prevent heart attacks mid-beat. Eliminate cancer cells the moment they form. Even upgrade your immune system with new capabilities.

I shared this dream in a vision video I executive-produced back in 2017. You can see it here:

Seven years later? Multiple research groups are making serious progress on exactly these technologies. What seemed like a fantasy in 2017 is becoming a practical limitation today.

What dismissed ideas in your industry are you now viewing differently? What early warning signs might you have been missing? Share your observations in the comments. Let's build collective intelligence about breakthrough innovations that are becoming a reality.

If this framework changed how you think about breakthrough innovation, then subscribe for more insights every week.

For deeper tools and detailed implementation guides, check out Studio Notes on Substack. Frameworks, tools, and guides—everything's completely free.

Your next breakthrough might be hiding behind something everyone calls fantasy. The tools are in your hands.

What dismissed idea will you investigate first?

To learn how to spot breakthroughs before they happen, listen to this week's show: 5 Questions That Spot Breakthroughs Before They Happen.

Get the tools to fuel your innovation journey → Innovation.Tools https://innovation.tools

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