Innovation can be hard when you’ve been around a while, but instilling these two values in employees can help, says Alibaba’s cofounder and chairman.
“We’ve gone through periods where we stopped innovating, and we suffer from it as a large company,” Joe Tsai said in an interview at Stanford University released on Wednesday. “Everybody has their role. It’s very difficult to get people to think about new things about the future, innovate.”
Creating a separate innovation division is not the solution, said Tsai, who joined the Chinese e-commerce firm in 1999 as a member of the founding team.
“I think the one thing that you need to do is to instill in people some sense of ownership,” he said.
“They’re not just working for their boss. Everybody should work for their customers,” he added, referring to a saying by Jack Ma, the company’s former CEO.
The idea is to care about making customers, not bosses, happy and start thinking about what customers will want in the future, Tsai said.
Another trait necessary for innovation is being agile. That matters, particularly in the technology business, where there is always a “deficiency of information.”
“You’d have to be able to tolerate not having full information and then just making a decision and committing to it,” he said. “Then if you find out you’re wrong, pivot fast in a different direction.”
The tech giant has staged a significant comeback in the last two years, driven by AI innovation and the restructuring of its e-commerce business.
In an earnings call late last year, Alibaba’s CEO, Eddie Wu, dismissed talk of an AI bubble and said he’s going all in on spending on the technology.
“We’re not even able to keep pace with the growth in customer demand,” Wu said, adding that in the next three years to come, AI resources will continue to be in short supply.
Wu said that the surge in demand isn’t coming from hype but from real-world AI adoption across the economy.
The company’s Qwen AI models compete with its global counterparts on benchmark tests.
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