Risk-Taking Is Back and So Is Rampant Innovation

My wife woke up this morning to the voice of Alec Baldwin telling her, "Wake up, Sunshine. Let me tell you something, I've been up since the crack of dawn..." before I shout out, "Off!" and silence Alec in midsentence. No, Alec isn't in our bedroom. Alec's voice is an alarm option in Alexa, our household's digital assistant that's built into both our Amazon Echo and Dot. It's simply the coolest -- and most practical -- innovation I've seen in decades.

Alexa is a vibrant example of the rampant innovation emerging today. Life-changing stuff: self-driving cars, VR immersion technology, drones, nanobots, sensors, and the Internet of so many more "things." But innovation requires risk for fuel. So for much of the last decade – with the exception of a handful of companies that were cash flush – innovation was stymied. That's because hardly anyone could afford to take risks. We were too busy making sure we could just put food on the table, so to speak. After all, baby's got to eat.

Risk taker, rule breaker

An exception was Amazon, one of the world's greatest risk-taking firms. Alphabet (Google) and Apple are two others, but what is so powerful about Amazon is how its very culture embraces the reality that innovation is most often the result of massive failure.

Just listen to what Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, said about 18 months ago: "A few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn't work." Kindle tablet = $$. Amazon's third-party marketplace = $$$. Amazon's data center business = $$$$$. And he added this: "Bold bets ... pay for a lot of failures. I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com." Think Fire Phone, hotel-booking site Amazon Destinations, and Amazon Auction, which was designed to compete with eBay, among dozens of others.