Iteration - Publications - Faculty & Research

18 Mar 2001
Research & Ideas

The Essentials for Enlightened Experimentation

incentives to encourage rapid experimentation. Consider using small development groups that contain key people (designers, test engineers, manufacturing engineers) with all the knowledge required to iterate rapidly. Determine what... View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke

30 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Why Evolutionary Software Development Works

development was evolutionary in nature. Companies first would release a low-functionality version of a product to selected customers at a very early stage of development. Thereafter work would proceed in an iterative fashion, with the... View Details

Keywords: by Alan MacCormack; Technology

03 Dec 2015
Op-Ed

How "New Nuclear" Power Could Save the Planet—If Regulators Would Allow It

States but around the world that hamper rapid iteration and experimentation in the product development process. This, in turn, stifles innovation, scares off private investors and creates an industry-regulatory culture that has grown to... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph Lassiter; Energy

27 May 2009
First Look

First Look: May 27, 2009

low-cost care. But in the case of iterative care, a patient's condition is unknown, and tremendous resources may be required for diagnosis and treatment, often with uncertain outcomes. Bohmer shows that to reduce costs and manage care... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

13 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

How Government Can Restore the Faith of Citizens

on citizens. (See slideshow below.) Click on image to view slideshowWeb sites help Boston citizens visualize what government is doing to help them. In the first iteration of the website, the researchers included only the number of open... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

26 May 2015
First Look

First Look: May 26

traditional theories of leader selection describe organizations as picking leaders with particular characteristics, LFT sees organizations as having a filtration process that evaluates a pool of candidates and iteratively removes them... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

06 May 2002
Research & Ideas

A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

faster—for two reasons. First, a company can bypass the expensive and error-prone effort to understand customer needs in detail. Second, the trial-and-error cycles that inevitably occur during product development can progress much more quickly because the View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke & Eric Von Hippel

01 May 2009
What Do You Think?

Do Innovation and Entrepreneurship Have to Be Incompatible with Organization Size?

(centered) around rapid iteration and customer insight." One way to address the challenge, according to Jeffrey Vetter, is to "separate out forward thinking groups from the day to day business." Dave Schnedler suggested... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

14 Apr 2008
Research & Ideas

The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing

Specialisterne seems uniquely suited to the kind of consulting work that requires tremendous powers of concentration. Not all software testing lends itself to offshoring. Certainly, some testing may be automated, but other elements cannot when the work requires a lot... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Video Game; Web Services; Computer

16 Sep 2015
Research & Ideas

Can Applied Economics Save Homeless Puppies?

Wagaroo. The initial iteration of Wagaroo was based entirely on trying to develop an effective matching algorithm. Prospective owners filled out surveys, indicating preferences about factors such as size, breed, energy level, age, and... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

21 May 2014
Lessons from the Classroom

CORe: HBS Powers Up Online Program on Business Fundamentals

diversity of international experience in such cases could be a boon to students in solving such problems. With such experiments, Narayanan and his colleagues are embracing the dynamic quality of the course in their design—using their own View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Education

11 Dec 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, December 11, 2018

start-up world and beyond. These methods have enabled technology companies large and small to accelerate their product development pipelines and reshape their relationships with customers. Drawing on academic research and interviews with practitioners, this note... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

03 Oct 2013
Research & Ideas

Lehman Brothers Plus Five: Have We Learned from Our Mistakes?

Act, which was passed by Congress in 2010, created a mechanism to deal with many of them, alongside Basel III the most recent iteration in global banking regulations. Important details of both are still being hammered out. The most... View Details

Keywords: Re: Multiple Faculty; Banking; Financial Services; Construction; Real Estate

09 Aug 2010
Research & Ideas

How to Speed Up Energy Innovation

Is there a special sauce for stimulating innovation in the energy sector, a concoction to spur cost-effective developments toward solving the climate change problem? HBS professor Rebecca Henderson doesn't claim to know all the ingredients for that special sauce. But... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Energy; Utilities

11 Feb 2013
Research & Ideas

Neuroeconomics: Eyes, Brain, Business

Science.) The researchers used morphing software to create a visual continuum of animacy, with images of doll faces at one end of the spectrum and images of similar human faces at the other. The images in between were morphed combinations of real and fake, which each... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

23 Jul 2014
Lessons from the Classroom

Innovation Is Magic. Really

content. And thus was born the wildly successful iTunes platform." The innovation lessons, which required many iterations and innovations in how the material is taught, magically seem to click in just the right way, Thomke says. "We... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Consumer Products

28 May 2013
First Look

First Look: May 28

change the structure, processes, and behavior of an organization while at the same time developing commitment that ensures execution. SFP is also a research method. By applying SFP iteratively to new and challenging situations,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

13 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

How to Pick Managers for Disruptive Growth

is a critical first step in assembling the capabilities required to succeed. We would, in Pandesic's instance, want a CEO who in the past had launched a venture thinking he or she had the right strategy, realized it wasn't working, and then View Details

Keywords: by Michael Raynor

03 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 3, 2018

one emerging economy. Based on an exploratory field study of medical device development projects in India, we observe the frequent, iterative testing of prototypes in clinical settings and investigate the related learning process. The... View Details