Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments

Don’t fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don’t work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind.

That’s what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage.

How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today’s managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns.

Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.

Stefan H. Thomke, a leading authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the author of Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), as well as over one hundred articles, cases, and notes published in books and journals such as Harvard Business Review, Management Science, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Thomke has chaired numerous executive education programs, both at Harvard Business School and in companies around the world. He is a frequent conference speaker and adviser to global business leaders.

You can find the author at:
hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6566
linkedin.com/in/stefan-thomke-innovation/