Co-creating Service-Dominant Business Artifacts with Action Design Research: Towards Ambidextrous Business Process Management

Abstract

Due to the rise of digital innovations, business process management research requires not only to focus on internal organizational improvement aspects. It should also adopt an explorative focus to include completely new business processes driven by digital innovations. Our research project began as an innovation initiative of an international Dutch conglomerate in the financial services sector for exploring new business models. This effort took the form of collaboration among academics in business informatics and practitioners. We formalized this collaboration by adopting action design research (ADR) for reaching impact within the company while contributing new knowledge. The use of ADR resulted in the artifacts’ co-creation that led to shared benefits, resulting in a win-win situation for the academics and practitioners.On the one hand, academics built a framework and its underlying artifacts for service-dominant business design and engineering. On the other hand, the framework supported the organizational transformation driven by digital innovation. This framework helps explore new strategic approaches that influence the design of new business models enabled by new business processes due to combining new and current capabilities known as business services.