Towards a New Theory of Experimental Strategy: A Response to Clark and Hunt’s "The Challenge and Opportunity of a Quantum Mechanics Metaphor in Organization and Management Research"

Abstract

In their comment on Heisenberg Effects in Experiments on Business Ideas (Shelef, Wuebker, and Barney, 2024b), Clark and Hunt (2024) argue that borrowing concepts from natural science to study organizational and business phenomena is notoriously difficult and that, if this is done, it is important to understand how the subtleties and complexities of a natural science concept apply to the organizational or business issues being analyzed. We agree—which is why our paper uses the idea of Heisenberg effects only as an analogy—that the act of experimenting can both reveal and change the value of a business idea—and not as an appeal to the quantum mechanics underlying the idea of Heisenberg effects in physics nor as an effort to apply this quantum physics logic to questions about when and how firms should experiment. The paper that Shelef et al. (2024b) actually wrote is part of a growing literature that recognizes that other considerations—beyond an experiment’s informativeness about the value of a business idea and its cost—can determine when and how a firm will experiment.