Creating a Culture of Innovation at Amazon Web Services

Creating a Culture of Innovation at Amazon Web Services

Amazon's success is driven by their culture of innovation, where everyone is empowered to come up with new ideas. They hire based on cultural fit and focus on their mission to be the earth's most customer-centric company. Amazon's mechanism for innovation, called "Working Backwards", starts with a customer problem and involves creating a press release to solve it. The press release is passed to the CEO for approval and goes through multiple iterations until it reaches senior stakeholders. Amazon's patience with innovation allowed them to launch game-changing products like the Amazon Echo, powered by Alexa.

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More Innovation Resources:

Five Strategies for Spotting Trends First - Innovationedge

Managers must improve their trend-watching capabilities to respond to increasing changes by auditing their information diet, developing new antenna, using social media as an early warning system, recalibrating their forecasting skills, and taking action on trends.

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Aligning Innovation Activities with Strategy Using Roadmaps

Aligning Innovation Activities with Strategy Using Roadmaps

Innovation roadmaps can align innovation efforts with business strategy. Gartner recommends selecting innovation activities focused on valued business outcomes, situational challenges, and best use of existing resources. ITONICS Roadmap tool supports innovation roadmapping.

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Using Open Innovation to Be Competitively Unpredictable

Psion Teklogix, a company that makes industrial strength mobile computers, uses open innovation to stay on top of emerging market changes and develop applications for its configurable platform, making it competitively unpredictable in a rapidly changing industry.

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