Before Jeff Bezos molded Amazon into the world's most profitable online shopping platform, he launched zShops. Formerly called Amazon Auctions, the program allowed third-party sellers to list their products on Amazon. These efforts did, however, lead to the development of Amazon Marketplace, which houses 2.5 million third-party sellers. But not just any kind of failure — productive failure. A productive failure "taught you something about what the path looks like by saying, 'Hey, guess what?

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Persons: Jeff Bezos, Bezos, Amy Edmondson, Edmondson Organizations: Amazon, Harvard Business School Locations: zShops