What Innovators Can Learn from the Movie "21" and Card Counters
Which will help your business be more successful: statistics or probability?
Underwriters at insurance companies use statistics to assess future risks. This is based on years of collected data.
Probability is what card counters in Vegas use to increase their odds of success. This is based on real-time, real-life experience.
If you want to play it safe, use statistics. If you want to win big, use probability.
There Are Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics – Mark Twain
Businesses are increasingly using statistics to manage decision making, as evidenced by popular books like Tom Davenport’s Competing on Analytics and the boom in CRM system usage.
The belief is that if we gather more data we can make better decisions. But this may not be true when it comes to innovation.
If you are crunching numbers, you are probably gathering information from existing customers. This will give you insight into their buying habits, usability behaviors, and other patterns. But most likely you are only gathering data on YOUR customers. This represents the middle of the bell curve or the norm. This information may be useful in “incremental” improvement, but it will rarely lead to significant innovations.
When you move beyond the norm to the far ends of the bell curve, you will find the real interesting ideas.
To read the rest of the article, go to my blog entry at:
http://www.steveshapiro.com/2008/03/21/how-innovators-can-learn-from-vegas-card-counters/
