Running head: MANAGING TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION i

Managing technology innovation

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MANAGING TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION 1

Abstract

Amazon is one of the world's best companies popularly known for its innovations. The

company possesses a hierarchical organizational structure and a culture promoting maximum

facilities for the customers and promoting equality in society by giving jobs regardless of race,

caste, and culture. The organization innovates products and services regularly to maximize the

benefits provided to the customers. The organization is known for its innovations in Artificial

Intelligence, cloud computing, and the delivery services of goods provided by this organization

to its customers. The organization also provides a platform for others to do business. The

organization allows everyone to use the innovations done by the organization to increase the

revenue of their business and to make their business successful.

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Introduction

The organization chosen is Amazon. It was founded by Jeff Bezos at Bellevue,

Washington DC, in July 1994. Amazon is an American global innovation organization based in

Seattle, specializing in Internet business, distributed computer systems, modern leaks, and

artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the four leading technology companies with Google,

Apple, and Facebook. Amazon is known for its disruption of business based on mechanical

progress and mass production. It is the world's largest online store, providing distributed rights to

artificial intelligence and computers, measured by market capitalization and revenues. Amazon is

the world's largest online organization in terms of revenue. It is the second-largest private

company in the USA and one of the largest in the world (Linden, Smith, & Com, 2003).

Organizational Structure

Amazon’s organizational structure can be described as hierarchical, that is, the command

is given from the authority of the organization to the lower staff of that organization. The

administration is composed of two general directors, three senior vice-presidents and an

international controller, who are responsible for a number of important parts of the organization

and are legally accountable to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. The organizational structure consists

of seven departments including innovation in data, human resources, and authenticity, while the

department heads also report to the CEO of the Amazon.

Due to the large size of the company, the hierarchical structure has been created at the Amazon.

The world's largest online retailer employs 560,000 people and has more than 300 million

customers worldwide, Amazon's management structure coordinates many small groups that

manage the company's various divisions. Jeff Bezos, inventor, and CEO of Amazon have

received recognition for introducing the "double pizza" principle. As stated in this criterion,
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meetings must be held in groups that are small enough to accommodate a total of only two

pizzas.

The structure of the Amazon is expected to be changed within a reasonable time after the success

of its food services called ‘Whole Foods’. Given the association's strong involvement in the

development of the business community, the association's hierarchical structure will remain

dynamic and, in line with clear changes, will be presented in the usual way.

Organizational Culture

The Amazon organizational culture has been presented as Darwin's "conscious approach"

to employee management. The organizational culture enables the business to meet the demands

of E-commerce markets. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, stresses the importance of constant

observation and lifestyle change in the Amazon so that it never loses its ability, agility and

willingness to experiment. With this in mind, Bezos constantly limits the culture of leadership to

a popular level that is the same for everyone. Also, Amazon is one of the most customer-oriented

organizations in the world where customers can find everything they need to shop online. A high

degree of customer focus is one of the cornerstones of Amazon's corporate culture and has a

direct impact on a wide range of trusted processes and technologies. The organizational culture

of the Amazon is also based on the recognition of the value of a diverse workforce. The

organization counts on GLAmazon, an official employee who likes a group of gays and lesbians

and the Black Network of Technology Workers and Women (Goran, LaBerge, & Srinivasan,

2017).

Organization’s Core Competencies

Core competency is a blended mix of numerous assets and aptitudes that recognize a firm

in the market. The huge success of Amazon is due to its effective core competencies that make
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this website the priority for buying and selling by the customers. The core competencies of

Amazon include its effective distribution strategy which provides customers quick shipping of

products free within two days and even in some areas, Amazon shipped the product within 2

hours of purchase. This makes this website an unmatchable retail website in the world that

provides such quick shipment. Amazon also posses core competency of providing platform and

tools to other people to run their businesses through the Amazon website, it was found that in

2017, more than 50% of Amazon’s sales were done by the third party merchants. Hence, it not

only provides commodities to customers but also helps people in earning by providing business

opportunities. Amazon also provides online job opportunities apart from selling, which is content

writing, data entry, customer service managers, etc. Amazon’s supermarket chain launched in

2017, is another major core competency of this website that provides food and groceries to its

customers in less time as compared to other websites. Other than that amazon's core

competencies regarding providing product’s honest reviews by the customers, showing the

availability of inventory, low price strategy for popular products, updates regarding shipment of

the goods and services are the things that have made this website most popular website in the

world known for providing maximum facilities to its customers.

Innovations in Amazon

The secret of the success of Amazon lies in its innovation policies regarding products and

services. Today, Amazon is a trillion-dollar organization that has confused many industries, from

retail to software development, with unique and destructive competencies and dynamics. It

seems that they are accelerating the pace of development, extending and questioning the law of

big business, which allows goats to stay somewhere close to their size (Liu, & Hong, 2016).
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Amazon has become a new model of sustainable development. Every time it launches something

new in the field of innovation, it is way better than the previous one. They are moving fast,

innovating so many new articles, procedures and action plans that their manual suddenly became

the standard by which every organization should assess itself or be left behind. The reason for

Amazon’s successful innovation management is the fearless approach of its CEO and his

mindset of planning for the long-term rather than for the short-term. Following are some of the

examples of innovations done by amazon:

Example of Innovation in Products by Amazon

Amazon innovates a showerhead by imitating precipitation as well as a removable

waterproof Bluetooth speaker within it which enables the customer to play the music, book

recordings, or webcasts of own choice. The speaker has a seven-hour run time, can be effectively

expelled to revive it, and even adjusts through Bluetooth with a phone or a tablet that is up to 33

feet away.

Example of Innovation in services by Amazon

Amazon innovates its services by providing a detailed and honest review of the

commodity by the people who have already consumed the product. It also clearly shows the

availability of the inventory of every product which helped in improving the order cancellation

problem faced by customers due to the unavailability of stock.

Example of Innovation in management by Amazon

The CEO and founder of Amazon innovate the management of the organization by

introducing double pizza policy which means that the big organizations should conduct small

team meetings so that every employee could have the opportunity to speak and discuss the

issues.
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Example of Innovation in processes by Amazon

Amazon innovates its processes by providing shipment of products to its customers in

less than 2 days with accurate updates regarding the date and time of the delivery of the shipment

to the customers.

Current Innovation Approach of Amazon

Amazon is one of the most innovative associations in the world. Amazon began as a

strong online book sales organization and is now not only a dominant retailer, but has also

introduced new mechanisms such as distributed computing and ingenious speakers. The path to

prosperity is by no means the only strategy, but the way it stimulates the customer's obsession,

which is especially important in their lifestyle and practice. Amazon always changes its approach

regarding innovation and comes up every time with a new approach to innovate the technology.

The current innovation approach of Amazon is to make innovations that can be in the best

interest of the customers. For this, Amazon is currently trying to innovate artificial intelligence to

solve problems faced by the organization and the customers. Amazon is trying to use applied AI

in its processes to help the customers in a more systematic way. Also, Amazon is trying to adopt

the approach of full-electric delivery systems to deliver packages to customers safely using

delivery robots. The current approach also includes innovation in services and products as per

the demand and interest of the customers. Amazon always thinks of innovations and do

innovations for the future predicting what would be the requirements in the future and for this it

is using its technology resources, to innovate the services and products. Amazon is also focusing

on building stores in different locations and is investing in brick and mortar as well, this is the

innovation approach made by Amazon to develop Amazon from an online store to a location-

based store as well.

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Challenges in Current Innovation Approach

Amazon’s innovation regarding the delivery system by the robots is a big challenge for

the innovators. Bursting into flames is only one of the numerous worries for these robots.

Consider them as self-driving vehicles, there is a lot of innovations required. Robotics believes

that roads are moderately organized, usually have traffic lights, smooth paths, and signals. In any

case, walkways are unadulterated turmoil. A delivery robot has to dodge humans streaming out

of storefronts and obstacles like buskers. Also, they need to then quickly explore streets when

they go across boulevards. It's a tough challenge at the beginning of cutting edge robots that have

started getting away plants and labs to wander this present reality (Dong, 2018).

Amazon’s Collaboration Strategies on Innovation

Amazon has always collaborated with others whenever it innovates technology to

facilitate the maximum number of people by the innovations. It always tries to collaborate with

other business people to use the innovation done by Amazon in their businesses by using the

platform of Amazon in their business. Amazon's plan of action likewise holds exercises for

different organizations to collaborate with their rivals to develop, and endure. Amazon also

collaborates with the third-party sellers who use Amazon to run their retailing websites. And thus

all these collaborating strategies are the reason for amazon being a trillion-dollar company today.

The company offers innovations to every person either to do business or to purchase their

products, which increases the company’s revenue. Like, Amazon allows third-party sellers to do

business by using Amazon’s products and in return, this increases the organization’s profit as

more people are buying amazon’s products.

Analysis
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The CEO of Amazon is a person of a very patience mind who don’t have a fear of failure

or loss. The company’s organizational and cultural approach is the main reason for the success of

this organization. The organization allows every employee to think creatively and present its idea

to the authority. The focus of Amazon is in utilizing all its efforts in innovating products and

services for its customers. The organization has a goal of facilitating not only buyers but also

people who want to do business or simply want to earn. The team responsible for innovation in

Amazon has been frequently doing innovations in services and products by applying new

methods of technology every time.

Results

Amazon had an income of $10.1 billion in 2018 and was being ranked as 2nd most

valuable website of the world. The revenue of Amazon is expected to increase further in 2019

due to the policies adopted by the organization. The organization’s main focus is to facilitate the

people of the world and for this, it does every possible innovation it can and is continuously

working on the innovations in products and technology more. The organization adopted an

innovation in delivering the products within 2 days and in some areas within 2 hours, the

innovation succeeded which more creates the trust of the customers on this website. The

company provides business opportunities to people which is also a big success for the

organization in terms of generating revenues (Reillier, 2017).  Thus, Amazon is a well-

established organization that is only expected to grow in the future and is going to change the

online shopping concept with its innovations.

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References

Dong, X. L. (2018, July). Challenges and innovations in building a product knowledge graph.

In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge

Discovery & Data Mining (pp. 2869-2869). ACM.

Goran, J., LaBerge, L., & Srinivasan, R. (2017). Culture for a digital age. McKinsey Quarterly

(10), 1-10.

Linden, G., Smith, B., & Com, J. Y. A. (2003). Industry report: Amazon. com recommendations:

Item-to-item collaborative filtering. In IEEE Distributed Systems Online.

Liu, C., & Hong, J. (2016). Strategies and service innovations of haitao business in the Chinese

market: A comparative case study of Amazon. cn vs Gmarket. co. kr. Asia Pacific

Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 10(1), 101-121.

Reillier, L. C., & Reillier, B. (2017). Platform strategy: How to unlock the power of communities

and networks to grow your business. Routledge.