How Amazon drives innovation (and should inspire the travel industry)
Amazon is often held up in travel circles as what to aim for when it comes to knowing customers and inspiring them to buy.
Many an airline and tour operator aspires to become the “Amazon of travel” (hello, Ryanair) establishing the sort of marketplace the online retailer is famous for.
But how does Amazon manage to push into new areas but still drive innovation as it grows?
Amazon Web Services head of innovation, David de Santiago, provided some insight into the online giant’s thinking at this week’s SITA Summit in Brussels.
To set the scene, he gave a pitch on the how the world has changed, the importance of the cloud and how disruptors are using it.
- "The world has changed dramatically. The most difficult challenge I have when I talk to customers is how you cope with change, how you cope with brutal change.
- Nowadays the world is dominated by digital wizards. When you think about what was competition to you just 10 years ago, you could clearly identify who your competitors were. I can guarantee you that in the next five years the competitors you will have are competitors that still don’t exist.
- It will be a bunch of kids out of a flat in San Francisco that will be able to go global and go viral, within minutes and all this thanks to the cloud."
The challenge for existing players, he says, is moving from their established world of “strict, defined, rigid process” to the world of “disruptors who are using unstable business processes which enable them to react quickly and shorten the value chain”.
His advice is that travel companies need to behave and think like software companies – pointing to the Boeing Dreamliner, which runs on seven million lines of code or the new Ford GT on ten million lines of its own.
Source: Tnooz
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