> Experimentation is contrasted with another mode of learning that I term Analysis. Classical competitive strategy emphasizes learning through analysis (Porter, 1980) whereby, instead of generating real options, entrepreneurs generate option sets and arrive at a decision through optimization (see Delmar and Shane, 2003, for an example). In my study, analysis includes gathering market, product, and regulatory data or developing business plans. Gans et al. (2019) distinguish analysis from experimentation in two important ways. Analysis is “commitment-free” whereas in experiments some irreversible investment in the ideas being tested is inescapable. In turn, the commitment-free nature of analysis implies that it can only yield noisy information, whereas experiments produce high-fidelity signals. I add a third difference, which is that analysis, in and of itself, conforms to standard and routinized practices,⁶ whereas experiments are, by definition, innovative and require counterfactual thinking (Camuffo et al., 2020). This delineation between the two modes of learning described above is also present in the practitioner literature (Bhidé, 2000; Blank, 2013; Ries, 2011).
I've been in the software business for a long time. I've been in startups and big companies, and worked with angels and VCs. But I have no idea what any of this means!
What is the market for a paper like this? And why can't it be written in plain English?