The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

EXPLOITING UNDERUTILIZED ASSETS

After the dot-com crash in 2000, Amazon.com—like many other Internet companies—was left with a lot of excess IT infrastructure. In fact, Jeff Bezos and his team discovered that the company was using only around 10 percent of the available capacity in its data centers. In an effort to leverage these underutilized resources, Amazon launched its web services platform in 2002 to give external users the ability to store and access data on its servers. By 2006, Amazon Web Services had become the first true cloud hosting service, allowing companies and individuals to rent server space for running their own computer applications, and defining the now-standard “pay-as-you-use” pricing model. Today, Amazon Web Services is the uncontested ruler of the cloud. In May 2014, a Gartner report estimated that Amazon now offers five times more cloud computing capacity than all of its 14 major competitors (including Microsoft, Google, IBM, and HP) combined.⁸⁴ One year earlier, Amazon Web Services beat IBM in their bid for a 10-year, $600 million contract to build a massive cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA.⁸⁵

In 2002, McDonald’s recognized that one of the underutilized assets of its franchisees was the parking space around the restaurants, which was generally empty after 10 PM when the restaurants were closed. In an effort to find new ways to exploit this asset, the company experimented with placing automated kiosks in some of the restaurant parking lots for ...