How to Set Up — and Learn — from Experiments

Stefan Thomke, professor at Harvard Business School, says running experiments can give companies tremendous value, but too often business leaders make decisions based on intuition. While A/B testing on large transaction volumes is common practice at Google, Booking.com, and Netfl ...  Show more

Harvard Business School’s Stefan Thomke says running experiments can give companies tremendous value, but too often business leaders still make decisions based on intuition. With the right approach, even small firms can get a competitive advantage from the right kinds of tests. 

How can organizations become more experimental? Julia Dhar, the cofounder and leader of BeSmart, BCG’s behavioral economics and insights initiative, says identify a big problem, start small, and do not overly worry that academics may criticize your experiment. As a bonus, Dhar ...

Entrepreneurs make a mistake: They often think of decisions as binary, where one answer is definitely right and the other is definitely wrong. Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter says there's a better way to approach decisions — and it's with "probabilistic thinking," a concept that's ...  Show more