Why Experimentation is Key to Digital Competitiveness

They are also under intense pressure to improve their innovation acumen in the quest to find the next breakthrough idea before anyone else does. But these aren’t the only paths to digital competitiveness. They can even cause companies to miss the boat.

Analytics, for example, focuses on past history, and even the most sophisticated predictive capabilities can miss market changes happening right now. Although breakthrough ideas are powerful, they are exceptionally difficult to devise and bring to market.

Enter enterprise-wide experimentation programs—where companies test and learn how the market will react to new product features, marketing messages, and user experiences and gather statistical evidence to make decisions.

In a new original research report: ‘Experimentation: The What & How of Digital Competitiveness‘, Harvard Business Review-Analytic Services state that experimentation is emerging as the next major digital capability that will separate business winners from losers. When done at scale, an enterprise-wide experimentation program can increase performance up to 5x in revenue, share of wallet, prospect conversion, risk mitigation, or product deployment efficiency. Even small improvements can add up quickly and beat competitors to the punch. 

Enterprise-wide experimentation also bolsters innovation by reaching out across the organization to generate as many ideas as possible. As employees see their ideas put to the test and produce revenue, the momentum builds.

The report, based on interviews with executives from leading companies such as Gap, HP, The Wall Street Journal, and European media giant Sky, along with other subject matter experts, delves into the rise of experimentation as the next major digital corporate capability and how companies are making it work. To learn more, access the full Harvard Business Review-Analytic Services report here.

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