Idea generation in exploitative and explorative business process redesign techniques

Abstract Business process redesign has received considerable attention in research and practice. An important task contributing to redesign is idea generation. It has been argued that the choice of technique influences redesign outcomes, but empirical evidence is largely missing. In this paper, we examine the role of idea generation in business process redesign by comparing two different kinds of techniques: exploitative and explorative redesign techniques. Often, exploitative techniques are expected to yield more appropriate solutions, while explorative techniques are associated with more creative outcomes. To investigate such propositions, we consider the Best Practices of Process Redesign as an example of an exploitative redesign technique and the Business Process Design Space as an explorative redesign technique. We conducted a free-simulation experiment to study the empirical impact of the choice of redesign techniques on outcomes. We find that the Business Process Design Space leads to a higher number of redesign ideas, which are also more diverse. These are more creative and novel than ideas produced by the Best Practices of Process Redesign. Against expectation, the best practices as an exploitative approach do not produce more appropriate nor impactful ideas in our task design. Since both approaches cover different areas of improvement, a key implication of our work is that they should not be seen as isolated approaches to redesign; rather, they should be purposefully combined to not only create novel but also operational business process redesigns.