ABSTRACT
Abstract: The abundance of innovative concepts in the business world and their differentiated influence on business practices make one wonder what shapes these concepts. Taking the perspective that a concept evolves as an organizing vision for applying an innovation in firms, this chapter addresses one aspect of the evolution: how does the popularity of one concept influence that of the other? Studying the discourse on business process reengineering (BPR) in the past 15 years, I found that the popularity of BPR, at different points in time, was associated with the popularity of four other concepts: total quality management (TQM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), knowledge management, and e-business. The intrinsically related contents of these concepts not only explained their correlated popularity but also revealed a moving frontier of BPR. Historically, TQM served as a comparative vision for understanding BPR, and ERP offered a means to do reengineering. More recently, as traditional focal processes such as order fulfillment and software development have already been reengineered, knowledge management and e-business have helped shift the focus to knowledge-intensive and interorganizational processes. The chapter ends with a call for more research into the process by which innovative concepts emerge and business knowledge spreads.
