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.