Managing Creative Risks

Business process management (BPM) has emerged as an important enabler for managing risks. Organizations use BPM techniques such as process modeling to create transparency and to identify process-related risks. Existent risk management frameworks distinguish between different types of risk, such as people, technical, and management risk. Our study suggests that creativity in business processes leads to a particular subset of risks which organizations respond to by applying specific strategies of risk avoidance and mitigation. These creative risks occur within business processes as different people come together to generate creative products. These people bring in different perceptions of creativity and aesthetics and solve creative tasks in different ways. Thus, business processes that involve creativity are characterized by a high variance both in process flow and process outcome which can lead to unwanted consequences. Based on interpretive case studies we introduce the concept of creative risk and explain what strategies organizations can apply to handle it.