The most successful organizations aren’t the ones with the most ideas, but the ones that can turn ideas into measurable business impact, fast. Across Asia-Pacific, we have seen this play out time and again; businesses that build innovation into their operating model are better equipped to respond to change, serve customers and lead in their industries.
At AWS, this has been our experience as well. Innovation is in our DNA. And it doesn’t start with a whiteboard or a brainstorming session, but with a customer problem. Every new feature, service or capability we have built in the region stems from a real customer need, whether explicitly stated or not.
More than 90% of new AWS features come directly from customer feedback. If something doesn’t address a real challenge or improve the customer experience, we don’t pursue it. This customer-first approach has resulted in a practical, repeatable methodology that organizations of all sizes can adapt and scale. The challenge is while technology can unlock possibilities, it’s culture and people that turn this potential into tangible business outcomes.
Building an Innovation Engine
At AWS, we’ve developed a powerful engine that turns customer feedback into continuous innovation. This engine runs on four essential components: our culture of innovation, our experimental builder mindset, our proven mechanisms and our flexible architecture. Together, these elements help organizations make innovation part of their daily rhythm, not an afterthought.
Turning ideas into results consistently takes more than good intent. At AWS, we use defined mechanisms that ensure clarity and accountability. One example is our “Working Backwards” concept, written narratives that start with the customer and work backward to create solutions. This sharpens the focus on customer outcomes and transforms vague ideas into concrete solutions.
We have also designed our technical and organizational systems to keep this engine running smoothly and enable rapid innovation. Our use of microservices and APIs lets teams test, build and launch without waiting for large-scale system overhauls. This architecture allows us to test hypotheses quickly, learn from failures and iterate rapidly.
Cultivating a Day 1 Culture
At Amazon, we often say it’s always Day 1, meaning we maintain the agility and customer obsession of a startup, even at our scale. This mindset shapes how we approach innovation. While mechanisms and architecture provide the foundation, culture is what determines whether innovation actually happens. We cultivate builders who think long-term, have an enormous level of curiosity and aren’t afraid to push boundaries. Our culture empowers teams to take intelligent risks, experiment, learn fast and fully own their ideas – including their failures.
“While it’s a huge tech company, it’s not actually the tech, but the culture and the people that were Amazon’s single most significant contribution to our transformation. They really live the culture and the values, and definitely we would not be where we are today without them,” says Dennis Omila, Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer, UnionBank of the Philippines.We encourage experimentation – even if it means getting things wrong sometimes. Intelligent failure is a critical part of the learning process. What matters is whether a team can extract insights and pivot quickly on what they learned.
Finally, we have designed our organization to support innovation at scale. Leaders own specific outcomes with full accountability. Meanwhile, our “two-pizza team” model (small teams that can be fed with just two pizzas) ensures that groups remain small and agile, enabling them to make decisions quickly and own their outcomes. Most importantly, our organizational structure puts decision-making authority as close to the customer as possible.
Clear ownership, fast decisions and alignment around customer outcomes help us move from ideas to results quickly – and help our customers do the same.
Bringing Innovation to Life
The ability to respond to change by leveraging innovation has become table stakes in today’s environment, where digital-native competitors are disrupting established players, customers expect more and wait less, and technology cycles are accelerating.
Our customers tell us that while they realize the imperative, they are struggling to find a catalyst to accelerate their transformation. Working backward from this, we created the AWS Innovation Hub in Singapore. Rather than another corporate showcase, it’s a hands-on workspace where leaders from across the region experience how innovation happens at Amazon and develop concrete next steps for their own transformation journeys. Visitors practice using our mechanisms, experiment with our frameworks and witness our customer-obsessed innovation in action.
Through industry-specific use cases, we demonstrate how AWS is helping transform businesses across the region. More than 90,000 startups in Asia-Pacific are using AWS to solve complex challenges, scale rapidly and stay ahead. Our real-world examples demonstrate the best of Amazon, AWS Partner Network and customer co-innovation with real-world solutions to solve real-world problems. We highlight locally optimized solutions with proven business and societal value: from financial services applications that expand access for the unbanked to healthcare solutions that improve access in remote areas. Rather than leaving with just inspiration, customers leave with a clear action plan of what they can do next and how to do it.
Innovation That Lasts
The journey doesn’t stop when a customer leaves the Hub. We continue working with organizations to build internal capability, refine their processes and keep moving them forward. In addition to business transformation, we’re focused on helping organizations use technology to solve meaningful challenges across the region to create lasting positive impact in our Asia-Pacific and Japan communities.
The Innovation Hub is much more than a collection of demos; it’s where we bring together our culture of innovation, cutting edge technology and proven mechanisms to solve real challenges. We co-innovate with customers and partners to build practical solutions, bridge essential skill gaps, prototype and validate ideas rapidly, and create responsible approaches to scalable digital transformation.
For CEOs and business leaders ready to transform their business and reimagine customer experiences, the AWS Innovation Hub offers a path forward. It’s where visionaries come together to build the capabilities needed to pull the future forward, creating meaningful impact that extends beyond business to benefit billions of people across Asia-Pacific and Japan.
