innovation

Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The... See more

Iconic successes seemed outright strange at first: Amazon (wait days to receive a product you’ve never seen), eBay (buy beanie babies from someone thousands of miles away), Google (trust an algorithm to answer your questions), LinkedIn (publicly post your resume), Facebook (share personal updates with people you haven’t seen in years), Airbnb (stay... See more

Jobs: In the future, it won’t be an act of faith. The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would... See more

Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.

Peter Drucker saidthat “business has only two functions — marketing and innovation .” Marketing and innovation have one thing in common – satisfying the unmet needs of the customer. The customer, thus, is at the heart of ecosystem thinking. And the customer lies outside the business.