Nov 5, 2018
I’m an innovation guy.
It may not say so on my business card, but that’s what I
do.
I encourage people, whether inside HP or in my meetings with
customers around the world, to accept that they and their product
are going to have to change.
No matter how popular and successful your work is, things
change.
The economy shifts; your customers’ needs evolve; technologies
become redundant.
We’ve talked about this in earlier chapters, but looking forward,
preparing for the inevitable evolutions in your business and your
product are crucial if you’re going to succeed.
Amazon has been brilliant at refining What they do and
How they do it to reflect the changing criteria of Who they’re
doing it for.
This kind of flexibility is to be expected in the formative and
pliable early years of a business or industry.
What’s impressive is that Amazon has retained that spirit even as
they’ve solidified into the cornerstone of the digital
marketplace.
The first phase of the Amazon era addressed readers’ criteria
and hassles in the mid-’90s.
They made it easy to buy any book, no matter how niche or obscure,
thereby undercutting Borders and Barnes & Noble to offer a cheaper
product and saving you a trip to the mall in the process.
Mission accomplished.
This very simple What—cheaper books, huge selection, delivered
to your door—worked.
Since then, they’ve diversified the products offered to the point
where they are essentially an online department store.
They’ve experimented with everything from a search engine—A9 (built
on the Google platform, but not a hit)—to allowing small
booksellers a chance to list their books on the site.
Their Amazon Mechanical Turk service allows individuals to make
money by offering their services in tiny increments of
time.
Have five minutes free? Make a little money transcribing a
two-minute podcast.
Whether any of these Whats are really a good idea is
up for debate.
Amazon’s detractors argue that they are diluting their core message
and product.
I’d counter that they are taking risks and exploring new uses for
their existing infrastructure.
Much of Amazon’s explorations in creating new value are based
around a tweak of this Killer Question, which goes something like
“Is there unused space in my existing infrastructure that could be
filled?”
Amazon has vastly more server capacity than they generally need
in order to address requirements at peak times such as the
Christmas holiday season or Black Friday.
As a result, they have taken their cue from companies like
Rackspace and Media Temple and have begun renting their servers to
provide infrastructure for third-party websites.
Their leap from selling books and other retail goods to getting
into the computing infrastructure business has been
unexpected.
But it has worked well.
Amazon S3 is very successful, and lots of start-ups use
it.
As long as you have a credit card number, you can have servers and
storage.
Amazon can easily allocate you more space on the servers as your
business grows and needs more capacity.
The lesson here is to avoid being pigeonholed into one set of
services.
Take a look at any underused resources you have
available.
Is there a way that you could offer these to your customers as an
auxiliary service to your main business?
Finding ways to offer underused resources as a service and see
income where there would otherwise be none is brilliant.
These explorations might not yield big payoffs, but the point is
that you need to be constantly looking at new ways to stay ahead of
the trends that are shaping your industry.
[Sparking Points]
Are there year-round or seasonally based un- or underused assets or capabilities in your company (real estate, capacity, distribution, etc.)?
What customers, partners, or suppliers could benefit from having access to those assets?
What business model would you need in order to promote, sell, or support a set of products or services around these unused assets?