[[Jeff Bezos]] talks about the [[Amazon]] approach to [[innovation]].
Excerpts
0:45 [[Betty Graham]] invented white-out because she was annoyed by the inability to erase on a typewriter. She sold it to [[Gillette]] for $45M, and it was just white paint!
2:07Two approaches to solving problems with innovation: #Ankified
Encounter a problem, and find a solution for it.
Work backwards by taking a new technology or understanding and finding important problems to solve with it. This is common in technology. E.g. [[carbon dating]].
2:45Persistence is a key attribute of innovators. E.g. WD-40 stands for "Water Displacement, 40th attempt". They originally made the product to keep water off [[Atlas 5]] rocket on US government contract. #[[persistence]] #[[characteristics of innovators]] #Ankified
Barriers to Innovation #[[barriers to innovation]] #Ankified
[[learned helplessness]]: Ordinary things bother innovators, while non-innovators become complacent and accept things as they are. E.g. windshield wipers – people used to stop every mile and use a rag. The inventor had to push through criticism that the wipers would be distracting, but in 10 years they were standard. Once people tried it they saw the value. (4:30)
[[either/or thinking]]: [[Amazon]] is always trying to reduce the number of [[customer contacts]]. This is a win-win for [[Amazon]] and its [[customers]]. It saves money for Amazon, and customers enjoy not having to deal with support. Eliminating defects saves money because you don’t have to handle customer contact and you improve the customer experience. There’s no [[trade-off]]. (10:00)
13:34To innovate, you need to maximize the rate of [[experimentation]]. To do that, the cost experimentation has to be low. [[Amazon]] has built infrastructure to make experimentation easy, in a self-service way, without huge coordination or approval.
18:00 [[Amazon]] is [[customer]] focused rather than [[competitor]] focused. Competitor strategy changes all the time, but the core things that customers want do not change: selection, low prices, and convenience. In 10 years, that’s going to stay the same. #[[customer vs competitor focus]]
22:00You need to have small, separate, empowered teams that aren’t subject to [[dependencies]] across the organization. They need to know whether they’re getting better or not. It’s easy to do that in a broad way (e.g. company profits) but difficult for individual teams – that’s the key. #KPIs
29:00The [[internet]] makes the customer experience a [[fixed cost]] rather than [[variable cost]]. "Buy With 1 Click" costs [[Amazon]] the same amount to develop whether they had 1000 customers or 1,000,000 customers. For retail stores, it’s not the same – with more customers, an improved experience costs more.
35:00Invention will always lead you down paths that people think are weird. #invention #innovation
45:00Hire builders. To have an innovative company, the single most important thing (more important than reducing the cost of experimentation) is to make sure you’re hiring the correct people in your organization. Hire people that like to build, like to invent. Get people that do this at all levels of granularity: some people are only interested in inventing at the grandest whiteboard level, but they can’t make progress in the real world, because they’re unwilling to figure out how to mount the camera on top of the truck. It turns out, that’s incredibly important. #Hiring #innovation #Ankified
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One thought on “Roam Notes on “Taking on the Challenge” Lecture by Jeff Bezos”
One thought on “Roam Notes on “Taking on the Challenge” Lecture by Jeff Bezos”