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.

业务流程重新设计在研究和实践中受到了相当多的关注。有助于重新设计的一项重要任务是创意的产生。有人认为，技术的选择会影响重新设计的结果，但很大程度上缺乏经验证据。在本文中，我们通过比较两种不同的技术：利用性和探索性重新设计技术，研究创意生成在业务流程重新设计中的作用。通常，利用性技术有望产生更合适的解决方案，而探索性技术则与更具创造性的结果相关。为了研究这些命题，我们将流程重新设计的最佳实践视为利用性重新设计技术的示例，并将业务流程设计空间视为探索性重新设计技术。我们进行了自由模拟实验，以研究重新设计技术的选择对结果的实证影响。我们发现业务流程设计空间带来了更多的重新设计想法，而且也更加多样化。这些比流程重新设计最佳实践产生的想法更具创意和新颖。与预期相反，作为一种利用方法的最佳实践并没有在我们的任务设计中产生更合适或更有影响力的想法。由于这两种方法涵盖了不同的改进领域，因此我们工作的一个关键含义是，它们不应被视为孤立的重新设计方法；相反，它们应该有目的地结合起来，不仅可以创造新颖的业务流程，而且可以重新设计可操作的业务流程。