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The importance of testing assumptions

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s talk from the TED conference last month was recently posted online. In the first 4.5 minutes of it, Ariely (who wrote the best-selling book Predictably Irrational ) addresses, through his own experience, a topic that is also quite relevant for innovators in an uncertain environment: the importance of testing assumptions through experiments.
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Capital One: benchmark in experimentation based management

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...
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Culture of experimentation and future of strategy

Tom Davenport posted on his Harvard Business School Publishing blog his view on the future of strategy. He stresses the importance of experimentation: A Culture of Experimentation and Learning A company focused on entrepreneurial execution would have a culture based on experimentation and learning, so that no major strategy or initiative is undertaken without extensive testing, the use of a control group, and other aspects of the scientific method. In this sort of culture, any particular strategy, process design, or performance metric is only a hypothesis about how the world works. It should be tested and confirmed on a small scale before proceeding to the large scale initiative. Capital One, for example, undertakes more than 60,000 experiments a year in credit card marketing and other financial offerings. Toyota is also known for its culture of experimentation and learning. Entrepreneurial execution is an effective compromise between the overly deterministic approach of strategic engi...
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