Experimentation
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"What experimenters share is a passion for hard work, a curious mind and an openness to serendipity"
– Tom Kelley, IDEO
This toolkit provides insight into Experimentation, one of the six elements that the we, in the LIH, explore in depth in our "Innovation Culture" training.
Here you'll learn what it's all about and why this element is particularly important in terms of innovation culture.Below, in the download section, you will find external as well as LIH resources that will give you a deeper understanding of the element and provide opportunities for application.
We celebrate the Wright brother’s success at Kitty Hawk, but often overlook the fact that they tested more than 200 wing shapes and risked their lives crashing seven different flying machines before they managed to pioneer flight. At the very heart of innovation lies experimentation, the systematic exploration of new ideas, methods, and approaches. According to the best selling book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation”, experimenters are one of 10 various roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation. We argue here that in order to nurture and sustain a culture of continuous innovation within their teams, leaders should pay particular attention to the role experimentation plays, in bringing a team together to test, fail and learn quickly while capitalising on expertise and experience.
Why is this important for innovation
Research conducted by Thomke and von Hippel (2002) demonstrates that companies that prioritize experimentation are more likely to achieve breakthrough innovations and gain a competitive edge. At Booking.com for example, they follow a core tenet: Anyone at the company can test anything –without management’s permission. At any given time, quadrillions of landing-page versions are live, meaning two customers in the same location are unlikely to see the same version. This bold approach helped transform a small Dutch start-up into the world’s largest online accommodation platform.
At its fundament, experimentation fuels creativity, promotes problem-solving, and cultivates a culture of continuous improvement.
- Experimentation Fuels Creativity | Experimentation serves as a catalyst for creativity by encouraging individuals to explore uncharted territories. When we experiment, we step away from the comfort of familiar routines and embrace the unknown.
- Experimentation Promotes Problem Solving | Within the scope of innovative practice, we test hypotheses, identify obstacles, and find effective solutions. Innovation leaders use experimentation to provide a structured approach for validating theories and refining understanding.
- Experimentation Cultivates Continuous Improvement | Experimentation encourages individuals to view failures not as setbacks but as opportunities for learning and growth. An experiential approach helps to take calculated risks, and as over time, as teams refine existing practices, they push boundaries to achieve breakthroughs.The key to effective experimentation lies in the development of low-fidelity prototypes to gather feedback, in order to test ideas based on real-world data. This data-driven approach minimises risk and enables organisations to make informed decisions. It’s possible to prototype just about anything, so long as we strive to create an environment where it’s okay to present less polished prototypes.“Give your teams freedom to innovate and make things happen, but hold them accountable to a speed of learning. Not a speed of reaching scale – a speed of learning.” – Beth Comstock, former vice chair of GE
Rough and ready prototypes help us to problem solve by quickly trying out various possibilities. But in creative problem solving, we tend to converge our thinking far too quickly, as we rush our efforts to find consensus and an adequate solution within the confines of an allocated meeting. As an innovation leader, we need to strive to help our teams to suspend a decision a little longer, and to spend more time tinkering with possible solutions.
Below we share a curation of resources that were part of the Innovation Culture designed and delivered by the Lufthansa Innovation Hub.
What to expect from this toolkit
Tools & Methods
- Arche Assumption Canvas: This Canvas helps you to formulate your assumptions combining the three perspectives of desirability, feasibility, and viability.
- Assumption Mapping: The Assumption Mapping Cheatsheet helps to prioritise assumptions about an idea or product. It aims to identify the critical assumptions that need to be validated to justify the value of an idea or product and further investment in resources for it.
- Experiment Planner: You will find all the different types of experiments you can use to either discover a potential idea or validate an existing one. This pack will walk you through how to establish an hypothesis, as well as how to select and plan an experiment.
- AI Experiment Selector: Describe in a sentence or two the idea, feature, or assumption you want to test, and this tool matches you with fitting experiments from the Testing Business Ideas library and sequences them into a plan that moves from cheap early signals to strong evidence.
Read:
- Experimentation Works: Let this book guide you through best practices in business experimentation, how these practices work at leading companies, and 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?
- The Power of Experiments – Decision Making in a Data-Driven World: How tech companies like Google, Airbnb, StubHub, and Facebook learn from experiments in our data-driven world—an excellent primer on experimental and behavioral economics
- How To Inspire A Culture Of Experimentation: Jon MacDonald of The Good lays out a six-step guide to building a culture of experimentation, from getting comfortable with failure and making small bets to A/B testing everything and letting data, not opinions, drive decisions.
- Enlightened Experimentation – The New Imperative for Innovation: In this classic HBR piece, "Enlightened Experimentation" by Stefan Thomke, you'll learn how tools like computer simulation and rapid prototyping make experimenting faster and cheaper, and why companies need to rethink their processes and organization to fully benefit.
- Want Your Company to Get Better at Experimentation?: Researchers from Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Eppo, and Netflix explain how companies can scale up testing by moving it out of the hands of a few data scientists and empowering product, marketing, and sales teams to run their own experiments, which becomes even more important as AI reshapes innovation.
Watch
- Hypothesis Thinking with Florian Brueckner:: In this video, Florian Brueckner – Director of Transformation at the Lufthansa Innovation Hub – guides you through the concept of Hypothesis Thinking, helping you to immediately get started and fill out canvases on the spot.
- Lead Like a Scientist by Charlotte Blank: Behavioral scientist Charlotte Blank uses a surprising field experiment with car dealerships to show that "more money" isn't always the best motivator and why leaders should treat their hunches about incentives and recognition as hypotheses to test.
- Duolingo's Cem Kansu: Duolingo's VP of Product, Cem Kansu, shares how the company grew into a $15-billion learning platform by running constant A/B tests, using gamification and AI to keep learners engaged, and building a freemium model that makes money while keeping education free.
Listen:
- 1000 Experiments Club: Experts in experimentation share their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs, with a focus on the idea that there's no such thing as a "failed" experiment, since every test is a chance to learn.
Act
- Experiment Selector: An AI tool where you describe an idea, feature or assumption in a sentence or two and get matching experiments from the Testing Business Ideas library, sequenced into a plan that moves from cheap early signals to strong evidence.
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