How the Amazon Innovation Accelerator changed the way PlusNext innovates

Some businesses run on instinct instead of evidence. You’ve got the technical skill, the ideas, the team to build almost anything. So you do. The risk isn’t whether you can build something. It’s finding out months later that nobody needed it in the first place. 

That was PlusNext’s default mode before the Amazon Innovation Accelerator. Founder Volkan Sakar has spent 25 years in business, running the IT services firm for the last five – serving 1,700 clients across the UK, Germany, Belgium, Turkey and the US. 

Strong on the build, light on the proof 

As a business that employs a core team of 14, PlusNext was rarely short on ideas or technical ability. What it lacked was a consistent way of knowing an idea was worth their time before building it. 

Before the programme, our approach was quite technical and opportunity led. We already gathered customer feedback, but lacked a consistent, structured validation process that we applied before committing significant development resources. 

As a result, Volkan and his team often struggled with prioritisation.  

We have many ideas and strong technical capability. But we also have limited time and resources. Sometimes that meant we’d move into development before fully validating the intended customer, the problem and how success would be measured. 

Putting the customer in the front seat 

Throughout the programme, the takeaway that stuck with Volkan came from Amazon’s own approach to innovation.  

The biggest lesson was to work backwards from a clearly defined customer. Amazon’s approach showed me that innovation isn’t just about having a good idea. It’s about creating a repeatable mechanism, defining ownership and measuring the outcome. The concept has made us more ambitious, but more disciplined too. 

One clear example of is in Volkan’s focus for the programme: LeadFit AI, an AI-assisted tool built to research potential customers and create personalised outreach. Initially, this started out as something purely to support PlusNext’s sales team.  

We stopped seeing it as just an internal tool and started thinking of it as a genuine standalone service. Now, we’re trying to separate our assumptions from evidence before committing significant time to development. 

Improving confidence in leading innovation 

More importantly, the Amazon Innovation Accelerator has changed how Volkan felt about leading product innovation himself. 

The programme has increased my confidence in leading an innovation process. In fact, it's changed my approach completely. Now I know we must define the customer before building a product so that we can sell it – without sales it doesn’t matter how good a product you’ve built. 

That discipline now has numbers attached to it. PlusNext has built an internal pilot with defined measures, research time, prospect quality, response rates and meetings. Today, one sales rep can research and approach 20 highly targeted prospects a month using LeadFit AI. The company has a goal to scale this to 100 monthly prospects, without losing personalisation or human control. 

The benefits of the accelerator have been passed onto my team. Their skills in customer-led product development have improved. It has also strengthened the resilience of the business as we have developed a repeatable way to find and serve new clients. 

Without the programme, progress would've been slower. LeadFit AI would have remained an internal tool, instead of a customer-focused product.

Both Volkan and his team will be applying that same discipline to whatever comes next: testing first, building second and only scaling once the evidence backs it up.