CENTER for PROCESS INNOVATION
Robinson College of Business - Georgia State University
The Center for Process Innovation (CEPRIN) is a college-level research unit within J. Mack Robinson College of Business. CEPRIN was founded in January 2004 in collaboration between the College and the Georgia Research Alliance.
CEPRIN focuses on "end-to-end business process innovation". Our preferred modus operandi for research is to collaborate closely with industry partners on research projects of mutual interest, engaging a multi-disciplinary group of researchers (faculty and Ph.D. students) in these projects.
CEPRIN focuses on "end-to-end business process innovation". Our preferred modus operandi for research is to collaborate closely with industry partners on research projects of mutual interest, engaging a multi-disciplinary group of researchers (faculty and Ph.D. students) in these projects.
CEPRIN's research embraces the following areas:
- Efficient and responsive satisfaction of an end-consumers’ need for a good or service through the study and improvement of the physical and informational flows and the processes they connect with.
- Transitions across organizational boundaries of such flows and the multiplicity of issues this creates in terms of information sharing, benefit distribution, legal impediments, trust, risk management, and mutual cooperation.
- Achieving visibility over the entire process and for effective means to measure and improve its flows.
- Rapidly reconfigure and amend networks to more quickly respond to changes in market needs and economic opportunities.
- Development and implementation of information services and infrastructures that support transactions and networking across organizational boundaries.
Views on Process Innovation
While the principle faculty share this common vision, each has their own particular view on the area of process innovation. Below are the three viewpoints:
To me, process innovation is ...
In a word "servipreneurship." Of course, this word doesn't exist in normal usage (yet), but for me it captures the essential elements. Namely, all services, under the covers, are (business) processes. Services exist to provide a solution to the client to solve some or all of a problem they have. Innovation is the result of considering the prospective clients problem-to-be-solved, then defining a service that does this much better. And just as form follows function, process follows service. Each service is, in my view, a mini-business whose execution is by a business process. In that vein, innovating a process is, equivalently, offering a new or better solution to the service client, and those who do it are "servipreneurs."
Process innovation is about ...