As new innovations, technologies, customer expectations, business models, or further competitors appear, organisations must be able to respond to such demands regularly and swiftly. Explorative business process management (BPM) helps organisations to overcome these challenges by enabling new innovations and business models or fundamentally redesigning processes. Organisations currently rely on and will even more in the future on skilled, educated employees to successfully perform in the Digital Age. Therefore, higher education institutions need to teach proper content to prepare their students, as future employees, for these challenges. Against this background, the three consortium partners (i.e. UNILI, WU and UTB) will work jointly on a project to develop, test and evaluate a reference module about explorative BPM for students of higher education institutions. With the help of the named reference module, students of higher education institutions have the chance to gain new skills and knowledge in the field of explorative BPM, a field with enormous importance and impact for organisations to stay competitive, especially in Europe. Students will be able to correspond to the labour market and social needs and foster their employability. Moreover, the project supports the transfer of the latest research outputs into education as an input for teaching. Students also will explore contemporary research and develop research skills to become a researcher. By offering access to its final material, this project encourages educators to implement the module and its related lectures at future higher education institutions. Four main project activities contribute to the fulfilment of the project's main objective. Project activities include: (1) the identification of the current state of explorative BPM; (2) the development of guidelines, recommendations and various lectures for the reference module; (3) testing and evaluating the reference module; and (4) the dissemination of the results across different channels for local, regional and national, and European and international audiences. Although this project directly targets educators and students within higher education in the field of information systems, other stakeholders, like educators from different levels, practitioners and researchers, may also benefit from the project's results. Project results are aimed to impact the target groups and other stakeholders on the local, regional and national, and European and international level alike. Not only students and educators in higher education but also other stakeholders like researchers and practitioners may benefit from the project's results. We aim to improve the partners' and participants' expertise in explorative BPM and how to teach explorative BPM in higher education. Project partners plan to make project results openly accessible to students and educators in higher education. Their dissemination strategy targets all stakeholders and includes several digital and non-digital activities such as postings on social media and educational platforms, presentations and talks, as well as reports and articles.
This project developed a reference curriculum to teach explorative Business Process Management (explorative BPM) to university students. This was motivated by two observations. First, digital innovation is becoming more and more important, and future manager should know about potentials associated with emerging technologies. Second, while BPM has become an influential management paradigm in contemporary organizational work, it has traditionally neglected the role of (digital) innovation. In response to these observations, we developed a curriculum to teach explorative BPM. In doing so, we (1) conducted conceptual and empirical research and developed the Five Diamond Method to realize explorative BPM in organizations, (2) used this model to design a 4-ECTS curriculum which we have taught and evaluated at universities in Austria, Germany and Liechtenstein, as well as with practitioners and BPM professionals and (3) disseminated our results through academic talks, several publications and an innovative virtual workshop format. In terms of dissemination, we want to highlight the following numbers: - We taught the explorative BPM curriculum to around 200 students in three European unviersities - We presented the Five-Diamond-Method to around 170 practitioners in Europe - We presented and discussed our findings with around 80 academics at various conferences in Europe - We published our findings in academic as well as practitioner-related journals Taken together, this project created considerable impact on students, practitioners and academics. In terms of long-term impact, we expect that our FIve-Diamond-Method will continue to enhance innovation activities in the context of BPM, and inform future research activities in the international academic environment.