HBR On Strategy

How Booking.com Sustains a Culture of Innovation

Jun 12, 2024

Harvard Business School professor, Stefan Thomke, discusses Booking.com's innovative culture driven by large-scale testing and experimentation. Topics include strategy, digital travel, platform, and challenging management norms. Learn how the company sustained growth through a data-driven approach to innovation.

27:56

Episode guests

Stefan Thomke

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Quick takeaways

Booking.com's success stemmed from large-scale testing and fostering an innovation-driven culture.

Business experimentation at Booking.com highlights the value of incremental changes and high tolerance for failure.

Deep dives

Booking.com's Innovation Culture and Large-Scale Testing

Booking.com became a billion-dollar digital travel market player by implementing large-scale testing and fostering an innovation-focused culture. They challenged traditional management assumptions and avoided relying on intuition for designing digital experiences. The company's unique experimentation culture allowed for radical experiments, such as changing the optimized landing page, leading to valuable insights into user behavior and responses.

Democratized Experimentation with Checks and Balances

01:48

Big Data and Experimentation: A Complementary Pair for Innovation

01:17

Intro

3min

Testing Innovation at Booking.com

9min

Sustaining a Culture of Innovation through Data and Experimentation

3min

Driving Innovation Through Continuous Experimentation

10min

Big Data, Experimentation, and Innovation

4min

Exploring the Power of Business Experiments

2min

Booking.com was founded by a Dutch university student in 1996. It grew slowly for almost a decade. By 2011, the company was generating more than a billion dollars in profits annually — making it the most financially successful digital travel market at the time. The secret to that accelerating growth was the company’s use of large-scale testing and experimentation.

In this episode, Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke explains how the company created and sustained a culture of innovation that challenged conventional assumptions about management and process.

Key episode topics include: strategy, experimentation, innovation, travel, digital, platform.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original Cold Call episode: At Booking.com, Innovation Means Constant Failure (2019)

· Find more episodes of Cold Call

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

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HBR On Strategy

How Booking.com Sustains a Culture of Innovation

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Deep dives

Booking.com's Innovation Culture and Large-Scale Testing

The Power of Business Experimentation

Balancing Big Data and Experimentation

Creating a Culture of Transparent Experimentation

Democratized Experimentation with Checks and Balances

Big Data and Experimentation: A Complementary Pair for Innovation

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts