Experimental Governance: Insights into Its Application in Business Processes and Future Research Directions

Experimental Governance (EG) has emerged as a strategic framework for managing complexity in high-uncertainty environments. However, its application in the private sector remains fragmented, often conflated with purely operational tools. This study addresses this gap by performing a conceptual transfer of EG principles into the domain of business processes. Through an expanded Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of 41 peer-reviewed articles (covering the period 2004–2026), we identify what we term the ‘Internalization Paradox’: while firms rapidly adopt experimental methodologies like Agile or Lean, they often fail to embed them into formal governance structures that ensure long-term accountability and institutional learning. This updated review incorporates cutting-edge discussions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance, experimentalist metagovernance, and the strategic regulation of uncertainty. Our findings suggest that organizational resilience is not merely a byproduct of technological readiness, but an emergence of ‘Institutionalized Experimentalism’. We propose a Conceptual Framework that operationalizes EG through iterative feedback loops, corporate sandboxes, and adaptive decision rights, providing a robust roadmap for future empirical research in management and organizational theory.