Citation (IEEE): S. Thomke, “R&D Comes to Services: Bank of America’s Pathbreaking Experiments,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 70–79, Apr. 2003.
What it argues
Thomke describes how a large retail bank applied the discipline of research and development to service innovation. It turned a set of working branches into a laboratory and ran formal experiments there with real customers. He walks through the process of choosing, designing, running and evaluating experiments, and the difficulties of testing live: protecting customers and the brand, controlling for people who behave differently when they are watched, and rewarding staff fairly. He argues that service companies can learn systematically, as product companies do, if they are willing to experiment in the field.