NEW YORK — When your job title is “director of Moonshots” at a company called X, and your products include giant stratospheric balloons, it may not seem like you would have much to offer professionals working to improve sanitation in urban slums, help smallholder farmers increase their yields, or extend health services to the hardest to reach communities.
Yet Astro Teller was an in-demand speaker at United Nations General Assembly side events last week, with delegates wanting to understand how X — a sibling company of Google that works on radical solutions to vast challenges using cutting-edge technology — operates.
The Sustainable Development Agenda is one of the frameworks the X team considers when identifying the kinds of problems they want to solve. And the approach taken by this self-described “culture engineer” holds valuable lessons for leaders of NGOs and others working to accelerate progress on sustainable development solutions.