When it comes to trying out new business models, improving customer experience or developing new products in multinationals, even the most experienced managers get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience and big data alone do not really work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments.

This course will guide you through best practices in business experimentation and illustrate how these practices work in some of the leading companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, Microsoft and others, which run thousands of different controlled experiments annually and engage millions of users.

It will answer some fundamental questions, such as:

• What makes a good experiment?
• How to run experimental tests in online and off-line business models?
• How to build a culture in companies that supports experimentation?
• How the future of experimentation in multinationals will look like and why we need to start preparing for it?

Upon successful completion of this course, you will:

1.      Develop skills needed for running your own business experiments;

2.      Be familiar with different business segments where experiments are suitable approach for testing and solving problems;

3.      Understand different ways to develop an experimenting organization that puts experimentation in the center of its innovation process.

Regular attendance is a requirement to pass this course. You can skip up to 20% of the lectures.

This course is comprised of lectures, in-class and homework case analyses, an experimental lab visit for practical experience and a team research experimental project. This is a highly interactive course. Thus, students are expected to be fully engaged during Q&A sessions and give their critical assessment in written form.

Assessment will be based on both individual and team performance.

Assignments with percent of total grade:

• Active participation: 15%
• Case study 1 (group, in class): 15%
• Case study 2 (individual, homework): 20%
• Group final assignment: 50%

The final grade will be based on the following total points out of 100:

• 90 - 100:          A
• 80 - 89:           B
• 70 - 79:           C
• 50 - 69:           D
• Less than 50:   F (Failed)

Please log in with your WU account to use all functionalities of read!t. For off-campus access to our licensed electronic resources, remember to activate your VPN connection connection. In case you encounter any technical problems or have questions regarding read!t, please feel free to contact the library at readinglists@wu.ac.at.

Please contact me via e-mail for an appointment, e-mail address: jelena.cerar@wu.ac.at