Experimentation Matters

 

introduction

Experimentation matters because it fuels the discovery and creation of knowledge and thereby leads to the development and improvement of products, processes, systems, and organizations. Put concretely, without experimentation, we might all still be living in caves and using rocks as tools. Anything we use today arrives through a process of organized experimentation, over time; improved tools, new processes, and alternative technologies all have arisen because they have been worked out in various structured ways.

But experimentation has often been expensive in terms of the time involved and the labor expended, even as it has been essential to innovation. What has changed, particularly given new technologies available, is that ...