A Method for Facilitating Process Exploration

Austrian Science Fund

Business process management is an approach used by many organizations to analyze and continuously improve their business processes. BPM is regarded as a discipline that primarily uses exploitative process innovation to provide considerable benefits to a company. However, while such exploitation addresses the needs of existing company customers, designing and introducing products and services for new markets and customer sets requires explorative process innovation. This type of process innovation typically entails departure from existing processes such that new processes could be introduced that will support the novel products and services. Therefore, for BPM to be responsive not only to existing customers, but to new customer segments, beyond exploitative process innovation, a novel method is necessary that will facilitate explorative process innovation in organizations and can be integrated with existing BPM methods and techniques.
In this project, we address the research problem of explorative process innovation in organizations. The key questions we aim to answer are: 1) What are the factors that enable explorative process innovation in organizations? 2) Based upon which principles can an appropriate method for process exploration in organizations be introduced? 3) How can explorative process innovation be integrated with existing BPM methods?