Experimentation is considered an essential form of dry run in most innovative processes, opening up numerous, largely untapped, possibilities for decision-making supportYou can test a theory or how a given mechanism functions, weigh up the pros and cons of a strategy, evaluate potential consequences, or even discover new unforeseen insights… Tempted to give it a try yet?
Tech and e-commerce giants use experiments all the time. In 2018, Google alone performed 10,000 test campaigns . A wide range of success stories illustrate the potential benefits. Microsoft, for example, by testing different formats for displaying ads, increased advertising revenue from its search engine Bing by 12 percent. Likewise, sales at Amazon skyrocketed after an experiment proved it was better to promote payment offers at the checkout rather than on product pages. And you don’t have to be in tech: any organization that produces or consumes data can carry out its own experiments (and that’s a lot of organizations!)). Nevertheless, user feedback from decision-makers outside tech is still relatively rare, maybe because – despite their apparent simplicity – experiments seem too complicated or risky to set up.
And yet, asking the right questions and using “the power of experiments” can facilitate faster, less risky decisions in increasingly chaotic environments.
Based on
The Power of Experiments – Decision-Making in a Data Driven World, by Michael Luca & Max H. Blazerman (MIT Press, 2020), andExperimentation works – The Surprising Power of Business Experiments,by Stefan Thomke (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).
Did you say experiment?
Regardless of their end use, all experiments operate schematically using the same model, known as AB testing, which measures the impact of modifications made to an independent variable (the presumed cause) on a dependent variable (the observed effect) by ensuring that everything that could influence the behavior of the latter remains constant throughout the experiment. Tests are conducted simultaneously on two groups of participants: a treatment group and a control group.
She spent 12 years in industry, working for Bolloré Technologies, among others. She co-founded Business Digest in 1992 and has been running the company since 1998. And she took the Internet plunge in 1996, even before coming on board as part of the BD team.
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