What do you think makes companies like Amazon or Google so innovative? With Amazon you might say their relentless focus on the customer. With Google, you might point to their powerful search engine or cloud computing.

What you might not think about is just how important experiments are to their success. Not just a few experiments, but tens of thousands run annually so they can improve on what they do.

And experiments aren’t just for tech companies with lots of data. Running thoughtful experiments can yield innovative results for all kinds of companies, big and small, startup to established, across all kinds of industries. It’s how we think about them – how we design them – that matters. And that’s where science and creativity come in.

Stefan Thomke, an innovation expert and Professor at Harvard Business School, is someone who’s spent his career helping companies design and run business experiments. He writes about what he’s learned in his book, Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. It’s not only a riveting analysis of what it looks like to be an experimentation organization. It's a playbook for building one.

Episode Links

Building a Culture of Experimentation

The Surprising Power of Online Experiments

Creating the Experimentation Organization

The Netflix Data War

The Discipline of Business Experimentation

A Smarter Way to Run Business Experiments

At Booking.com, Innovation Means Constant Failure

Jeff Bezos on Innovation

Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method (1964)

Novum Organum by Francis Bacon

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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CM 197: Stefan Thomke on How to Run Game-Changing Experiments

Curious Minds at Work