Class Notes: Teaching the Five-Diamond Method for Explorative BPM

BPM has developed strong capabilities to support the management and improvement of business processes. For example, the BPM Cases book (vom Brocke & Mendling, 2018) provides practical evidence across organizations and industries. It has also been stated that BPM has a strong potential to support the innovation of processes (vom Brocke & Schmiedel, 2015), but only a few methods and cases are actually available to support the exploration of new innovation opportunities. The term ambidextrous BPM has been coined (Rosemann, 2014), specifically accounting for the need to extend exploitative approaches of BPM by explorative ones (Badakhshan, Conboy, Grisold, & vom Brocke, 2019; Groß et al., in press). <br/> <br/>The central question in explorative BPM is how BPM can support the exploration of innovation opportunities in order to create new value propositions for organizations (Grisold, Gross, Röglinger, Stelzl, & vom Brocke, 2019). This ambition sets explorative BPM apart from the majority of methods, techniques and tools that are developed in the field. Following recent reviews, most of the existing BPM research gravitates towards exploitative BPM – activities aiming to increase operational efficiency by finding improvement opportunities in existing processes (Groß, Malinova, & Mendling, 2019; vom Brocke et al., in press). <br/> <br/>How can we enable explorative BPM in organizations? This is an important, yet complex question. Within our EU-funded Erasmus+ project on explorative BPM, we have formed a consortium between the University of Liechtenstein, the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of Bayreuth to jointly investigate this question. We have developed a method to enable explorative BPM in practice as well as a curriculum to teach the foundations of explorative BPM in universities. The curriculum will be freely available soon. In this class note, we provide a brief overview of what we have found.