Design a randomized control trial for a business.

Choose a decision, process, or practice in your current/past job that could be/has been further improved by applying techniques from quantitative research. By quantitative research, we mean a randomized control trial. You must design a business experiment that follows the golden standard method from the medical community. Propose how would you divide your target population into two groups and apply a treatment to one of them. This will help you to isolate the effects of such treatment. Think of whether you can control for the Hawthorne Effect. Can you design a study that is double-blind? Would it be unethical for one of the groups not to receive the treatment? Should the participants be informed that they are being studied? If so, what biases would your proposed study bring?

You are NOT going to run the experiment.

Therefore, there are no numbers, regression, p-values, or confidence intervals to calculate here. Rather, you are proposing how should a business hypothesis be tested following the scientific method. Ensure you mention estimates on cost/budget and timing of your experiment. Be realistic. Is your experiment feasible in the context of the industry/business your experiment would run? Be productive. Is the variable(s) you are measuring impactful for the business. Would it make a difference in sales or profit if you were able to determine whether your treatment works or not? Which barriers could you face in the organization/team/department in deploying your experiment? Think of prior personal biases or long-ill misconceptions from yourself, your team, your clients, and your consumers. This may oppose your experiment because they are convinced there is no point in measuring that treatment. Think of the Memorial Hermann Hospital from one of the readings who was tempted to allocate resources on improving the taste of the patient's food. Has your organization incurred such traps? What could you or your company do to systematically create an analytical and data-based decision-making culture?

Word count and structure guidelines

500 to 700 words Include an opening paragraph -five to six lines- that summarizes the entire paper. This is not an intro that describes what the paper is about, rather this is a full summary of the paper. Most importantly it summarizes your proposed RCT with costs and timing estimates. Think of this, if my paper landed in the hands of busy executives, would they have a full understanding of what my proposed RCT is, and would they be able to approve it just by reading the opening paragraph? Keep refining your opening paragraph until the answer the question before is YES. Do not answer the paper in a Q&A format style. Rather use sections and sub-headings. Strengthen your storytelling by using numbers and charts, if adequate. You MUST include an element of RANDOMIZATION, TREATMENT, AND CONTROL GROUP. Ensure you have read the literature provided under Modules. Particularly the Oregon Health Care Experiment. Failure to comply with this critical element of Business Experimentation will lead to a reduced grade. See the rubric. However, you are NOT to use statistics jargon. You are writing for senior executives in your company or a business. They don't need a lecture from you on what RTC is. Don't even mention that term. Rather, use everyday business terms and write persuasively to convince them running your experiment is worth achieving because it will allow you to measure the true impact of the practice or the change you wish to deploy.

Scholarly academic sources:

No matter which function/industry/process/practice you choose, a scholar would have already published around that topic in a peer-reviewed source. Therefore, you need to back up your hypothesis -or defend why your RTC is different from what has been done before- by sourcing prior scientific studies. As mentioned in the rubric, you MUST use sources outside of the ones given to you in the pre-readings. You are welcome to use sources in the reading as well but these don't count towards your own literature review. Be sure to include at LEAST two scholarly academic sources. e.g. journal articles or books. Check the box for "peer-reviewed" while performing your search on Hult's Digital Library E.

IMPORTANT You are expected to produce a "new-to-the-world" RTC.