Experimentation Based Management

Trial-in-a-Box rapid prototyping platform accelerates process of identifying and evaluating profitable and sustainable business models. It adapts proven inventory and revenue sharing business models used successfully in TV market and optimizes them for highly personal mobile medium. Facilitating creation of ad and interactivity formats, program allows ad inventory owners to analyze appropriate advertising models based on regional regulatory environments. Trial-in-a-Box provides mobile TV value chain partners with the ability to test the effectiveness of multiple advertising business models, ranging from free broadcast TV to individual pay-per-stream, and everything in between. More information regarding GoldSpot Media's Trial-in-a-Box is available at http:// www.goldspotmedia.com/ .

Michael Schrage wrote "Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate" to show that a company dominates its industry when it designs prototypes quickly and frequently, and when it uses its innovations to continually transform itself and its relationships with customers and suppliers. Microsoft, Boeing, Royal Dutch/Shell and Disney are masters of what Schrage calls "rapid prototyping." Whether it's a spreadsheet that tests a new financial model or a foam prototype of a calculator, what interests Schrage is not the model itself, but the behavior that play--be it modeling, prototyping, or simulation--inspires. An organizational culture built around this kind of "serious play" is fundamental for encouraging innovation. Schrage argues that while prototypes and simulations are valuable in supporting an organization's existing behaviors, they're more valuable when they turn up surprises. In the last chapter, Schrage lays out t...

Capital One is a diversified financial services company offering a broad array of credit, savings and loan products to customers in the United States, UK, and Canada. It ranks #115 on the S&P 500 and #4 in Diversified Financials (BusinessWeek, 2005). Its stock has outperformed the S&P index since 1999. Founded by Richard Fairbank in 1988 based on his belief that the power of information, technology, testing and great people could be combined to bring highly customized financial products directly to consumers, Capital One has emerged as one of the America's largest consumer franchises with almost 50 million customer accounts and one of the nation's most recognized brands. In an interview for Fast Company Magazine Nigel Morris, Cap One’s president thus defined the reason behind their success: “Very few companies have the ability to test and learn.” Testing and learning form the foundation on which Capital One is built. The company tests every product offering, every proce...

Frans Johansson’s “Medici Effect” shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations. Arthur Koestler (1976) has coined the term “bisociation” to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking “on a single plane”, and the creative act, which always operates on more than one plane. Koestler developed his views on creativity from the study of humor, literature, and biology. He defines creativity as the juxtaposition of two self-consistent, but habitually incompatible frames of reference in the physical, psychological, or social world. A humorous anecdote illustrates this principal: Q: Where does a General keep his Armies? A: In his sleevies. The joke is a play on the definition of the word armies. It is most humorous to grade-school kids who will be caught up in the military frame of reference with the use of the words gene...

Experimentation-based-management (XBM) is a branch or variant of evidence-based-management (EBM). EBM is an emerging movement to explicitly use the current, best evidence in management decision-making. It was first presented by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in a seminal Harvard Business Review article published in 2006 in which they invited managers to ground decisions in the latest and best knowledge of what actually works. Pfeffer and Sutton were inspired by evidence-based medicine, a movement that has taken the medical establishment by storm over the 90’s. EBM developed as a response to a set of emerging factors in health care: concerns about practice variation; the rapid growth of medical technology, leading to a proliferation of diagnostic and treatment options; the patient empowerment movement; and psychological research that raised questions about the quality of human judgment and decision making. Research uncovered that physicians did not use much of the research which w...