It is a purposeful and coordinated activity geared to producing novel policy options that are injected into official policymaking and then replicated on a larger scale, or even formally incorporated into national law.
In more technical terms, experimentation aims "to inform policy by using experiments with direct interventions and control groups instead of observational studies or theoretical analyses"[6] If policy experimentation is designed and evaluated by social scientists as part of government-sponsored pilot programs, it is usually limited to narrowly defined trial measures and preselected target groups.
Such experimentation also opens up entirely new market segments and establishes new types of corporate organization, thereby regularly moving beyond the originally defined test groups and procedures and involving policymakers on different levels of the political system.
Transformative experimentation usually comes in the shape of demonstration projects taking place in a politically realistic—i.e., fluid, disturbed, and contested—context that escapes strict scientific controls, but can give a fuller view of the workings of novel policies and their impact on major social, market, or administrative actors.
Yet, under certain conditions, experimentation can transcend incrementalist tinkering with existing practices and lead to drastic policy departures and transformative change marked by the emergence of new configurations of actors, interests, institutions, ideologies, and goals.