Idea 20 - Experience curve The experience curve says that the more you do something, the less it costs to do it. And that has important implications if you have chosen to build your market share by having lower costs than your competitors - a cost advantage strategy. Experience curve theory is not the same as economies of scale, though scale can contribute to it. Its true ancestor is the learning curve. T.P. Wright, who studied the US aircraft industry, first devised the theory of the learning curve in the 1930s. He observed that every time cumulative aircraft production doubled - that's the total number made over time - the man-hours required to make each one fell by a constant percentage (10-15% according to his study). That percentage may change from industry to industry, ranging up to around 30%, but in most it remains fairly constant. Let's say it's 10%. If, after making 1,000 units of a particular product, each unit takes one hour to produce, when cumu