The Discipline of Business Experimentation
)
The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a result, managers often end up interpreting statistical noise as causation--and making bad decisions. To conduct experiments that are worth the expense and effort, companies need to ask themselves several questions.