Democratized Experimentation with Checks and Balances

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The company environment allows anyone to launch experiments without needing management permission, but also enables others to end experiments if needed. Transparency is crucial, requiring experiment broadcasting for critiques and questions internally. With over a thousand concurrent experiments, the company operates at large scales using the scientific method with checks, balances, and self-governance mechanisms in place.

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.

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

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