Balancing Creativity and Efficiency in Business Process Redesign: A Comparative Study of Explorative and Exploitative Techniques

Purpose: The research paper under consideration analyzes the relative effect of exploitative and explorative methods on business process redesign (BPR) results in terms of quantity of ideas, variety of ideas, suitability of idea, and effectiveness of idea. It aims at identifying how various redesign strategies strike the balance between creativity and operational efficiency in the organizations. Design/Methodology/Approach: A quantitative experimental study was adopted that involved 150 respondents, i.e. graduate students and BPM professionals assigned randomly to exploitative (Best Practices of Process Redesign) and explorative (Business Process Design Space) techniques groups. The participants were allowed to come up with redesign ideas of a standardized business process scenario, which were evaluated using the quantity, novelty, appropriateness, and impact. Findings: The results have shown that explorative techniques greatly produced a high number and variety of redesign ideas, which increased creativity and breadth of ideation, but exploitative techniques generated a slightly higher number of more appropriate ideas, but the disparity was not significant. There were no notable differences in the impactfulness of ideas of techniques. These results prove that explorative strategies can improve creative work, whereas exploitative strategies facilitate operational congruency. Implications/Originality/Value: This paper indicates the usefulness of an ambidextrous approach to BPR by suggesting that organizations should adopt an explorative and exploitative approach together in a strategic manner to realize the redesign results which are not only innovative but also implementable in a real organizational setting.