Amazon’s Ecosystem Map
Amazon’s Ecosystem Map
Its vast landscape ignores borders and harnesses startups
As of Q2 2020, Amazon’s ecosystem includes 200 million Echo devices (in people’s homes), 7,000 AI employees, 572 physical stores, a $19 billion digital ad business, 400 private label brands (from Basics to Presto to Solimo), 43 subsidiaries, a $1.5 billion eSports business, a $40 billion revenue cloud business, blockchain and IoT services, healthcare initiatives (like Care), a $40 billion R&D budget, a few startup investment funds, and much more …
Amazon’s strategists ignore traditional boundaries and borders. The focus: add services, digitize, link everything together, and speed up. The Amazon flywheel fuels a circular, data-driven ecosystem that’s bolstered by Open Innovation.
Open Innovation requires tapping into the startup world. Amazon has spent around $4 billion to acquire AI-orientated startups. Its Alexa Fund, alone, has also made more than 50 investments in Voice startups.
At the same time, Amazon invests in it’s own innovation Labs — Lab126, A9, and WebLabs. Over the past 12 months, it’s spent $37.3 billion on Research and Development, according to macrotrends.net:
Amazon is a new type of company. As the map depicts, it’s an ecosystem. The ecosystem is a living organism fueled by a flywheel of ever-changing data.
To compete with ecosystems run by companies like Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba … CEOs, boards-of-directors, and strategists to think in terms of ecosystems and data networks, not assets.