Question

Many times, innovative idea comes from other industries or other fields of work, please provide one example of such innovation.

Read more about this from HBR's Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry (M. Poetz, N. Franke, and M. Schreier).

Answer 1

Innovation is the heart of any business. People don't like to use or look at same old stuff every day. People need something new and that is where innovation comes into being. Innovators look at the opportunity, they constantly keep their brain at work looking out for opportunities. Most of the time innovations come from the field of work they are working in, but few innovations come from the personal interests that are pertained to other fields of work. One such innovation is "Amazon.com", one of the largest ecommerce portal and market place in the world. And the man behind this innovation is Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos worked at Wall Street initially and was one of the youngest Vice President of the company. While he was working in the financial industry, his heart was elsewhere. He always wanted to something different for his love for computers. Then came the idea to start off first online bookstore in the year 1995, which was an instant success. He became a sensation just within a month of starting his online venture, Amazon.com.

Started as an online book seller initially, Amazon.com ventured into other fields as well and started expanding into market place by selling electronics, toys, music, clothing, and much more. Which all this has taken shape and people started recognizing Amazon.com as a place where they would get everything at one place, Jeff's hunger for innovation took a step forward and then took the birth of Amazon Kindle. Kindle was initially launched into market place where people can exclusively read books online, anywhere and everywhere, without having a need to carry books in their bags, since Kindle has thousands of books available. People were impressed by this little innovation by Amazon.com and this virtual market place was considered as the most sought-after market place even today.