The Digital Mindset

6 The Experimentation Imperative

You Won’t Know Until You Try

You’ve probably seen the TV ads featuring yellow and black checkered dummies sitting in a car as it’s pushed at high speeds into a wall to demonstrate the vehicle’s safety. Those ads were modeled after actual crash experiments done by automotive engineers.¹ By the early 2000s, one US-based automobile company with a long history of such experiments had made a strategic move to reduce the number of physical experiments it ran. It moved the majority of crash tests to digital platforms.

The move made great economic sense. It cost over $750,000 to build and crash one preproduction vehicle in the lab. But it cost only pennies (once the infrastructure investment in software and computing ...