Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Experiments – the Key to Innovation

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
A major part of the work I do consists of experimentation (like, say, Online Events daily). Often the value of the experiment is so obscure, the results so uncertain, that it could never be mounted as a project - you have to just try something with some quick code and see if it flies. I have a long history of stuff like this, and it's where I generate a great deal of my knowledge. I am far more likely to depend on the results of my actual experiment than on consultants' reports, focus groups, and even user surveys and corporate needs analyses. So I am in agreement with Tim Kastelle here. "To be innovative, we have to try out new ideas. Some of these will fail... We face an environment that is filled with uncertainty. This makes planning dangerous. The best possible way to meet this uncertainty is not with intuition and guesswork, but with experimentation."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 07:55 a.m.

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