Case Study: Choosing Pathways
How Amazon played the full spectrum of Growth Pathways - and why the portfolio, not any one path, made it a giant.
Amazon is a masterclass in pathway thinking, because it did not pick one pathway - it ran a whole portfolio across all three value groups, over time. Reading its history through the seven pathways shows how a business grows by capturing value from what it has and creating entirely new foundations of value.
Capture in the core: Amazon relentlessly penetrated and perpetuated its book-selling core - lower prices, faster delivery, better selection - capturing more and more share (Pathways 1-2).
Broadening to adjacent markets: it applied its e-commerce foundation to category after category - electronics, apparel, everything - broadening into adjacent markets (Pathway 3).
Creating new foundations: Kindle escalated its offering to a new digital foundation (Pathway 4); AWS expanded it into an entirely new market - cloud computing - new to Amazon (Pathway 5).
Creating new markets: in offering cloud infrastructure as a utility, AWS helped create a market that barely existed before - close to a Pathway 6 blue-ocean move that reshaped the whole tech economy.
Your Turn
Think it through, then reveal.
Map your organisation onto the seven pathways like we did for Amazon. Where is your portfolio strong, and where is it dangerously empty?
Sources
- Public histories of Amazon's growth, 1994-present.
- Global Innovation Institute (GInI), Foundations of Innovation - Growth Pathways.
- Bryar, C. & Carr, B., Working Backwards, 2021.