One of the major limitations of the Recombinator is the availability of a suffcient underlying knowledge base of processes. The size of the underlying knowledge base has a direct influence on the usefulness of the Recombinator. Our experience with the Process Handbook has shown that the current knowledge base of more then 5,000 processes is adequate to generate interesting processes in a variety of domains. We believe that the universality of some of the concepts used (like the notion of the coordination mechanisms or the ubiquity of logistics processes) allow the tool to support some innovation with little prior content in the knowledge base. However, future research about the applicability of the tool in different domains is needed.In the future we plan to evaluate and refine the Recombinator in other domains (including logistics and manufacturing), and extend it to cover other aspects of our process innovation methodology such as generating new processes by subactivity re-ordering. Another issue we would like to address concerns managing the size of the process design space. The generative strength of our approach is a double-edged sword in the sense that it is often easy to create an overwhelming number of process alternatives. The procedures are not fully formalized, so human judgment is often needed, for example, to select the process design appropriate for one's needs from among the candidates generated by the Recombinator. While we do not expect to obviate the need for human judgment, we do plan to explore how the Recombinator can further reduce the burden of exploring/pruning a large process design space. In the meantime we believe that it will often be preferable to have too many options rather than too few.
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