Process Innovation (Spring 2023)

Abstract

The goal of the course is to address how digital process innovation can be used to redesign and digitalize organizational processes and reconfigure internal and external resources to sense and respond to new opportunities using practical methods and theories.

Description

In today’s ever-changing business environment, organizations constantly need to respond to new requirements and opportunities to create value for their stakeholders and create sustainable business models. This course focuses on digital process innovation that exploits the potential of digital technologies to redesign organizational processes and their related architectures they are embedded in, and reconfigure internal/external resources to sense and respond to new opportunities and challenges.

The course will cover:

• The fundamentals of digital innovation and process management and how they come together in theories of process innovation
  
• How methods and techniques of user-led innovation, modeling and prototyping can be used to identify and visualize user needs and create technical solutions that support practical transformations
  
• Concepts, theories, and frameworks that support reflecting more broadly on specific process innovations and understand their strategic embeddedness into organizations, industries, and ecosystems

Formal prerequisites

This course is for 2nd semester DIM students.

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Discuss theoretical foundations (i.e. theories, frameworks, concepts, and methods) of understanding and managing digital process innovation.
• Conceptualize new digital process innovations for specific cases based on theoretical foundations.
• Apply user needs identification and modeling techniques for process innovation that are correct and meet the purpose of eliciting requirements and modeling in specific situations
• Reflect on the implications of specific elicitation and modeling choices (including choice of modeling technique) in relation to a given process innovation.
• Develop a prototypical technical solution that innovates a given business process.
• Analyze and evaluate a given process innovation project using research on process innovation.
• Reflect on intended and unintended outcomes (at the organizational and industry level) of applying theoretical foundations taught in the course.

Learning activities

The course will be taught through lectures, exercises, case- and project work. After building on initial understanding of the process innovation concept and its theoretical foundation, the course will delve into learning of practical techniques that are useful for engaging stakeholders, visualizing and modeling process innovations, as well as building prototypical technical solutions and evaluating them. The course will end with theories that are helpful for reflecting more broadly about specific process innovations and a wrap-up and conclusion.

As part of the learning, the students will carry out a process innovation project. The insights acquired from the project are a foundation for the (individual) oral exam, conducted in groups of two.

To ensure course objectives, the project will be supervised and supported by the course teaching staff. The course manager strives to support learning by a diversity of engaging learning activities that can lead to good results but asks for active engagement and participation from the students.

Course literature

The course literature is published in the course page in LearnIT.

Student Activity Budget

Estimated distribution of learning activities for the typical student

• Preparation for lectures and exercises: 30%
• Lectures: 15%
• Exercises: 10%
• Project work, supervision included: 30%
• Exam with preparation: 15%

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
D: Submission of written work with following oral, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
D2G: Submission for groups with following oral exam supplemented by the submission. Shared responsibility for the report.

reexam

Exam type:
D: Submission of written work with following oral, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
D2G: Submission for groups with following oral exam supplemented by the submission. Shared responsibility for the report.

Time and date