IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-319-01056-4_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Accelerating Learning by Experimentation

In: Management of the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

Author

Listed:
  • Stefan Thomke

    (Harvard Business School)

Abstract

Beyond a company’s ability to innovate lies a process of experimentation that enables the organization to create and refine its products and services. The constantly changing environment and complex linkages between variables require not only moving between observation, exploration and experimentation, but also iterating between experiments. Trial-and-error types of experiments are also an integral part of innovation processes, even though they are frequently not fully recognized as experiments. New technologies for experimentation, e.g., rapid prototyping, amplify the importance of managing these factors, thus providing the potential for higher R&D performance, innovation and ultimately new ways of creating value for customers. Regardless of industry, companies share an iterative process of a four-step experimentation cycle, which consists in designing, building, running and analyzing the experiment. How learning occurs, or does not occur, is affected by several factors: fidelity, cost, feedback time, capacity, sequential and parallel strategies, signal-to-noise, and type. The ‘case’ of Team New Zealand – winner of the sailing regatta America’s Cup in 1995 – is woven through this chapter and shows how learning by experimentation works at the front end of innovation by integrating new experimentation technologies with tried-and-true methods and capturing the results in the organization.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefan Thomke, 2014. "Accelerating Learning by Experimentation," Springer Books, in: Oliver Gassmann & Fiona Schweitzer (ed.), Management of the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation, edition 127, pages 125-140, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-01056-4_10
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01056-4_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Schweitzer, Fiona & Mai, Robert, 2021. "The double-edged sword of intricate idea enactment in product development," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 392-402.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-01056-4_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.