In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos highlighted a trait common among customers in any business. “One thing I love about customers,” he wrote, “is that they are divinely discontent…people have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary.’”
Our conversations with the most successful small and medium businesses (SMBs) reveal this single-minded focus on customers defines their approach to innovation.
As companies grow and scale, competing business imperatives and pressures (e.g., cost, infrastructure, competition) arise, preventing you from focusing on meeting customers’ needs at speed. Yet understanding your customers’ needs and desires, and rapidly inventing solutions that meet those needs, is more critical than ever for companies looking to remain innovative in an increasingly complex business environment.
To help guide you on your own journey of customer-centric innovation, we have distilled learnings from our own experiences at Amazon, as well as patterns of innovation we have observed among our SMB customers into this ebook. This is intended to offer helpful tips and best practices for organizations seeking to innovate, including:
- How to recognize and overcome barriers to innovation
- How to build a customer-centric culture
- How to use practical mechanisms to make faster, better business decisions
- How to harness the full potential of technology to stay ahead
