Digital Innovation and Business Process Management: Opportunities and Challenges as Perceived by Practitioners

In this report, we summarize a large-scale online workshop series focusing on the connection between digital innovation and business process management. The workshop series—which contained four sessions in total that each lasted for an hour and involved on average of 120 practitioners and several academics—focused on complementing the primarily conceptual claims in this research area with in-depth insights from organizational practice. Each workshop shed light on specific aspects that appear important in the digital innovation and BPM context. We collected data from discussions during the sessions and from two surveys. Based on our findings, we identify three research directions to advance research at the intersection between digital innovation and BPM. We suggest that researchers 1) explore BPM’s role in digital innovation, 2) scope digital innovation activities in BPM projects, and 3) examine how to align organizational structures to support BPM-driven digital innovation activities. We point to several concrete avenues for future empirical research in this field.