This is the question Jeff Bezos asked in the 90s when he founded the online bookstore Amazon out of a Bellevue garage. Fast forward to 2021, the company now has over 350 million products listed in its marketplace and accounts for nearly 60% of online retail purchases in the US.

Today, Amazon’s success goes beyond just retail. The company has continuously invested in its logistics and fulfillment resources to keep up with increasing consumer expectations and its “next-day delivery” promise, becoming a logistics giant in its own right. It delivered 4.2 billion parcels in 2020 and was on track to become the largest package delivery carrier by 2022. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, mirrors a similar success story. It emerged from the infrastructure needs of its own business to effectively host a third of the entire internet and contribute 13% to Amazon’s nearly USD 470 billion topline in 2021.

The company’s innovation strategy is simple: Find a customer problem and work backward to innovate a solution. With a vision of being the Earth’s most customer-centric company, Amazon has kept up with emerging technologies through internal innovation; especially across its core focus areas, such as transportation, logistics, and information technology (IT), often accelerated by acquisitions and partnerships. In this Insight, we take a close look at what this internet powerhouse is up to across various emerging industries covered by SPEEDA Edge.