Viktor Dörfler

University of Strathclyde · Department of Management Science

Dr Viktor Dörfler combines his background in developing and implementing AI with scholarly research on knowledge and cultivating talent to address misconceptions about AI. The book explains what AI can and cannot do, carefully delineating facts from beliefs or wishful thinking. Filled with examples, this practical book is thought-provoking. The pur...

Since the recent rejuvenation of intuition research within the management literature, significant work has been done on conceptualizing intuition. Whilst remarkable progress has been achieved in many areas of intuition, the role of intuition in creativity remains comparatively under-researched. Through an extensive review of intuition literature, w...

This article contributes to the debate about rigor and relevance in management and organization research. The contribution derives from an empirical inquiry into the view of the research process of acknowledged experts in scientific research: Nobel Laureates. The research was conducted through loosely structured in-depth interviews with, and backgr...

In this article, we develop the founding elements of the concept of Communities of Practice by elaborating on the learning processes happening at the heart of such communities. In particular, we provide a consistent perspective on the notions of knowledge, knowing and knowledge sharing that is compatible with the essence of this concept – that lear...

We paraphrase Descartes' famous dictum in the area of AI ethics where the "I doubt and therefore I am" is suggested as a necessary aspect of morality. Therefore AI, which cannot doubt itself, cannot possess moral agency. Of course, this is not the end of the story. We explore various aspects of the human mind that substantially differ from AI, whic...

This paper describes methodological challenges when conducting multi-level archival research of strategizing in extreme contexts. Strategizing in extreme circumstances is methodologically tricky, especially given the complexities between the individual and organizational levels throughout time. This study demonstrates how these two levels interact...

This conceptual paper examines reasons why analytically educated learners may be reluctant to engage in sensory-based learning. Sensing is indispensable for constructing knowledge and should be employed on par with the intellect, particularly in today's complex and uncertain context. Yet, we have observed learners' reluctance to engage with sensing...

This stream of the 14th annual intuition symposium at AoM showcases new empirical research into the use of intuition in decision making and problem solving. All five contributions are based on findings from recent studies and draw conclusions relevant for intuition training. Bas and Dörfler explore whether knowledge workers in a crisis situation re...

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to understand the nature of uncertainty and extreme context, as well the relationship between them. The study describes uncertainty as the environment that is either unknown, i.e. where conditions can potentially become known but they are just not known to the given actors, at the given place and time;...

In this speculative essay I propose a new paradigm that I call, at least for the time being, Critical Interpretivism (CI). It is, a multilayered moderate philosophical position which in some sense mirrors Critical Realism-and as it can be expected from a mirror picture, it is the opposite in one dimension: at its core is a subjective rather than an...

Perhaps more than ever, contemporary management studies are tasked with the urgent need to understand and keep up with the increasingly complex and fast-changing world. In light of the grand challenges and societal and organizational stresses, it is no wonder that when crafting management studies, researchers have to embrace complexity. Nonetheless...

Trauma is a difficult-to-research area contemporaneously because of a wide range of practical and ethical reasons. This paper considers the nature of trauma, reviews the literature on studying trauma contemporaneously, considers the merits of archival research and reports on one author’s study of four episodes involving traumatic experiences using...

AI has long been regarded as a panacea for decision-making and many other aspects of knowledge work-something that will help humans get rid of their shortcomings. We believe that AI can become a useful tool to support decision-makers, but not that it can replace decision-makers. It is not just a matter of time and of the level of AI development. De...

Should not use "AI says…" (Responsibility) Working differently with AI (New operating model) Prediction Judgement Decision Action Physicians already work with AI in diagnosis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is loosely defined as machines that can accomplish tasks that humans would accomplish through thinking. This definition does not say anything about AI achieving this performance in ways similar to how we humans do it, however. The term artificial intelligence is used with two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to (art...

Intuiting can be conceptualized as a way of ‘direct knowing’, that is, knowing “without any use of conscious reasoning” (Sinclair & Ashkanasy, 2005: 357), through a process that seems to bypass sequential (i.e. step-by-step) reasoning. Although the terms ‘intuiting’ and ‘intuition’ are often used interchangeably, it is important to differentiate be...

Based on a recent study involving clinicians working in the New York greater area during the first wave of COVID-19, the authors assert that uncertainty is a ubiquitous environment rather than a bounded condition that one can ‘get through’. Using a metaphor of ‘an ocean as default habitat’ to represent the pervasiveness of Knightian uncertainty, th...

In this paper, we combine evidence from eight Indian pharmaceutical firms with extant literature and global best practices to conceptualize an integrative framework addressing the open innovation paradox (OIP), i.e., the tension between intellectual protection and openness. Firms in developing countries face additional challenges in the adoption of...

Uncertainty has become a leitmotif for knowledge workers in today’s business environment. Uncertainty is experienced when all options and their probabilities are not known, when there is an insufficient amount of data, incomplete data, too much data that cannot be processed timely or sufficiently, or low reliability of data. Uncertainty can be comp...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new concept that we believe may dominate organizational learning in the near future, as a process that both enables as well as constitutes strategy. We term this form of learning AI-powered embedded learning and it refers to a learning mode in which a human mentor and an AI-enabled mentor (software soluti...

Gamification is an emerging area in research and practice that has sparked considerable interest in management studies. The attention to gamification is amplified by the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies and augmented reality which touches on how people work and learn socially. Consequently, gamified tools' affordances affect situated learn...

To conduct a phenomenological study, researchers often follow the principles from either the descriptive or interpretive phenomenological schools of thought. This constrains researchers within the domain and limits the potentials of their data set. This paper introduces the Trans-Positional Cognition Approach (TPCA) as a novel synthesised phenomeno...

Creative leadership has been studied in different collaborative contexts that can be summarized as facilitating employees' creativity, directing the realization of the creative vision of a leader, and integrating different and diverse creative contributions. In this paper, we present the findings from a qualitative meta-analysis of literature-based...

The Covid-19 pandemic forced organizations to suddenly shift their people to remote work. The unexpected situation created a brand-new organizational landscape. It has been filled with uncertainty and required great openness and adaptability from both employees and organizations. The age-old dilemma of performance management, the trust vs. control,...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to improve our understanding of bracketing, one of the most central philosophical and theoretical constructs of phenomenology, as a theory of mind. Furthermore, we wanted to showcase how this theoretical construct can be implemented as a methodological tool. Design/methodology/approach In this study we have ado...

Philosophy is not the first to come to mind when we hear the notion of data. However, in this paper, we philosophise data, meaning, that we dig deep into philosophy in order to figure out how and why humankind elevated data to such a prestigious position that we do not believe it deserves. Our departure point is Russell Ackoff's hierarchy of mental...

In this paper, we discuss how a quantitative methodological approach underpinned by an interpretivist philosophical position has been adopted for studying threshold concepts in autistic adults. An emergent research design has included the use of autoethnography, interviews about lived experience, and social network analysis to build a rich, meaning...

The purpose of this phenomenological inquiry was to understand the way analytical thinkers use intuition and wayfinding under the conditions of uncertainty. The plan was to explore this phenomenon through interviewing software engineers and financial analysts. The methodological approach seemed straightforward: look to established design and method...

This paper presents fresh insights into how medium to large innovative technology companies in the energy business evolve their knowledge management (KM) capability. To date existing models of KM have been static, while this work provides a more dynamic approach. The primary data is analysed using a combination of an operational research (OR) appro...

A trio of researchers with very different backgrounds present an argument towards using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in Interpretivist research. Drawing upon an ongoing study where this approach has been put into practice, and continues to evolve, the advantages of remaining open-minded when choosing methods and resisting e...

This chapter is an update to the thinking framework for Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) proposed by Colin Eden 30 years ago. As the source paper, this chapter is a personal take on the topic; however, it is a personal take rooted in substantial experience in the broad area of decision-making and modelling and in some specific narrow areas of...

An autistic researcher presents a participatory autoethnography developed to explore how transformational threshold moments present in autistic adults across knowledge levels, and how identifying these moments in a participatory way can be used to enable people, both autistic and non-autistic, to achieve their potential. The importance of bracketin...

The increasingly popular trend of gamification has proved powerful in many areas, such as education and marketing, and has started making its way to the corporate environment. This exploratory study is focused on a particular part of corporate applications – using gamification to empower knowledge workers and to help them to interact with each othe...

Gamification is a new, rapidly growing trend impacting many areas of business such as learning and marketing. It has also been predicted to revolutionise the process of innovating. However, there have been very few examples of gamification supporting the innovating process within the academic literature. The starting point for this thought piece is...

Online support groups, resources, social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and illness blogs have recently emerged as popular media for patients, their caregivers and health care professionals. Online health resources play an important and supporting role in many people's everyday lives. This paper presents an onlin...

This paper discusses the proposed use of sentiment analysis and machine learning to explore threshold concepts. These moments of transformational learning exist only within the individual, making it essential to study them through lived experience. A combination of autoethnography, interviewing, and the afore-mentioned sentiment analysis and machin...

This paper is a first step towards gaining a better understanding of how to methodologically work out the unfolding of experiences through using archival process data. In recent years, management and organization scholars have used archival data to identify temporal phases Bingham and Kahl, 2013, reveal the unfolding of these temporal observations...

Our inquiry began by attempting to understand whether there are contexts in which human intuition consistently outperforms Artificial Intelligence (AI) in producing successful pathways for action. In order to figure this out, in this paper we distinguish between known, unknown (but knowable), and unknowable situations, using the Knightian uncertain...

In this chapter we propose expanding the scope of what is covered by scholarly research on intuition. Specifically, we suggest expanding this research into an area often labeled as unscientific. Much of what is considered scientific knowledge today used to be outside the realm of scientific, until someone achieved an understanding of a phenomenon t...

This chapter is an update to the thinking framework for Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) proposed by Colin Eden 30 years ago. As the source paper, this chapter is a personal take on the topic, however it is a personal take rooted in substantial experience in the broad area of decision making and modelling and in some specific narrow areas of d...

Using a qualitative-exploratory study that spans over several years, we explain how highly creative chefs engage in aesthetic composing, which we define as the deliberate transforming of felt aesthetic stimuli in due consideration of advancing a creative identity. We induce how world-renowned Michelin starred chefs receive inspiration from aestheti...

The literature on intuition within the management scholarship identified six necessary and sufficient characteristics that define intuition: intuition is rapid, alogical, holistic, tacit, has an intrinsic certainty, and is spontaneous (cf Dane & Pratt, 2007; Dörfler & Ackermann, 2012; Kahneman, 2003: 698; Sadler-Smith, 2008: 13). These features are...

The original formulation of communities of practice primarily focused on describing how learning, meaning, and identity within a community can translate into a sustained practice. Wenger-Trayner et al. elaborated the concept of landscapes of practice to describe how different communities of practice may interact, and belong to broader landscapes of...

In this conceptual methodology paper we explore the concept of bracketing in the phenomenological tradition. In this conceptual study we draw on experience from two empirical studies, one of which focused on the cognitive complexity of top scientists and the other on the creativity of top chefs. Both of these studies were framed in a phenomenologic...

Accounts of the creative process tend to be retrospective and implicitly ground the creative act within the person, the mind, the moment, the idea; in doing so, they often miss the larger sociomaterial qualities that can provide us with important insights about the social relationality and playfulness of the creative process. In this article, we ex...

Gamification is a new and rapidly growing trend impacting a wide range of areas, such as education, marketing, personal development and others. It can be an innovative output when applied to these fields. We can also see early examples of gamification being used to spark innovation activities in an organisation-i.e. be part of the process of innova...

In this chapter we reflect on a particular way of studying immensely high complexity, such as creativity, by investigating extraordinary achievers. The basis of our reflections are two empirical studies, one conducted in the area of haute cuisine, through interviewing top chefs, and the second conducted in the area of science, thorough interviewing...

“Though the river’s current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.” Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1200): Hōjōki

In this paper we systemize Eden and Ackermann's approach to causal mapping as a technique for analyzing semi-structured interviews. By doing so, we aim to popularize causal mapping as an accessible, yet structured and formalized, method that can be used in a variety of studies within the broad organization and management research. In our discussion...

Gamification has recommended itself as a powerful tool in many areas including knowledge management, and this paper is focused on the connection between a specific aspect of it, knowledge sharing and gamification. Grounded in data, this research offers a conceptual model of gamified knowledge sharing that attempts to explain how gamification facili...

We discuss some methodological struggles we are currently facing with regards to an exploratory-qualitative PhD project on the process of intuiting of strategists in crisis situations. We deal in particular with a notion of creativity and strategy that characterises intuiting and takes place in flow, which naturally forces us to bring in the dimens...

Technology is an essential part of most knowledge management (KM) initiatives, and the researchers have been both praising and criticising it for almost three decades. In this paper we take a more balanced view of the role of technology in KM and suggest that the impact of technology and the reliance on changes depend on the phase of KM evolution i...

PhD schools around the world have three problems: (1) the decreasing interest in academic careers, (2) the supply in the publication market is many times smaller than the demand for it (3) the ubiquity of positivism. Based on four years of experience with a transdisciplinary doctoral school, two years of experience in curriculum development and ano...

Experience innovation through co-creation is crucial for the competitiveness of tourism businesses. Exploiting technology for enabling and managing experience within a space of co-creation can significantly increase value for consumers. Although this is becoming well documented in academic literature, a look at the tourism industry, however, often...

The basis of this study are two underlying empirical projects. In the first one Viktor interviewed 17 Nobel Laureates trying to understand their cognitive complexity. (Dörfler & Eden, 2014a, 2017) In the second one Marc interviewed 18 top chefs trying to understand their creativity. (Stierand, 2015; Stierand & Dörfler, 2016; Stierand et al., 2014)...

Having delivered 5 talks on the topics within the range of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, in New York, London, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Muscat, in February I delivered a TEDx talk on the same topic - the video is now ready for viewing. Will Artificial Intelligence ever match the masterful leadership of an outstanding CEO, deepl...

Based on decades of combined experience in teaching, observing and working with decision makers, we realized that the praxis of decision making as well as our own approach has always been transdisciplinary. Therefore in this paper we offer a transdisciplinary model of decision making at three levels of reality, namely model, method and tool. We con...

Understanding intuition puzzled many researchers. Only philosophers were feeling comfortable to think about intuition not only as a legitimate but also as a possibly superior form of knowledge (see e.g. Bergson, 1911, 1946; Jung, 1921: §770; Spinoza, 1677: Part 5). It was thus during this early stage of intuition research, that philosophy provided...

We developed a systemic process framework for reflecting on becoming that we currently employ to study graduate students’ reflecting on becoming. We describe the process of reflecting on becoming as a systemic process of continuous self-making and discuss some philosophical reference points by building on process philosophy. We conclude that, in or...

In this paper we explore how those who arguably belong in the highest echelon of expertise arrived there. To this end, we conducted a series of loosely structured, open-ended, in-depth interviews with 19 scientists who were awarded the highest accolade of their respective disciplines, including 17 Nobel Laureates. In an attempt to make the most of...

The Knowledge management (KM) field has been both extensively researched by academics and widely discussed by practitioners, but most of the research is limited to the case studies of one-time KM initiatives in large organisations. In this paper we propose to look at KM as a process, as a journey that a company undertakes, going through natural pha...

Maturity models have been successfully used in a number of areas, such as software development and supply chain management, and their success has made them appealing for other areas, including knowledge management. This study questions the validity of the existing maturity models in knowledge management and attempts to build one using a transparent...

Structured Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new workshop format concerned with the facilitation of Communities of Practice (CoPs). The introduced workshop format is based on a method of causal mapping, and it is aimed at helping the CoP members to understand better the possibilities of 'making most' of their community...

Structured Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the problem of validating new transdisciplinary knowledge. The problem of validating new knowledge is always hard, but in case of mono-disciplinary knowledge, we at least have the disciplinary knowledge against which to validate. However, when transdisciplinary knowledge is creat...

Purpose: This exploratory paper investigates gamification as a medium for knowledge workers to interact with each other. The paper aims to open the discussion around the sus-taining impact that gamification might have on knowledge management. Design/methodology/approach: The paper employs an exploratory literature review inves-tigating the current...

In this opinion paper we introduce a school-wide concept at doctoral level aimed at professional practitioners, who wish to stay in their respective areas of work. The rationale behind this school-wide concept is that in Hungary, where its implementation is currently in progress, gaining a PhD automatically means becoming an academic. However, ther...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the roles of the coach and the coachee from the perspective of their respective competences and a particular type of the coaching process that we call ‘competent coaching’. We also show how this process can be supported with a knowledge-based expert system (KBS); to illustrate this, we introduce a particular...

Scholars studying intuition are frequently focusing on decision-takers and to this day conceptualize intuition as a form of judgment. More recently, the notion of intuition in creativity has been challenged by the argument that although the creative process may contain intuitive judgments, any creative idea or solution is essentially the result of...

Gamification is a new but rapidly growing trend impacting a wide range of areas, such as education, marketing and others and it could be considered an innovation in these areas, though it is rarely seen in this light. On the other hand, gamification was predicted to revolutionise the innovating process by now, but we do not see many examples of it....

In this narrative review we go beyond other organizational creativity research attempting to find a comprehensive narrative structure of creative conditions and look instead through an antenarrative lens at more dynamic interplay of embodied practices that can bring about new discoveries. Through theorizing, contextualised in the haute cuisine indu...

Appropriability regime in India has undergone a major change in 2005 legalizing product patent protection. Using empirical data from 50 semi-structured interviews with key players in the Indian pharmaceutical sector, we show that a strong appropriability regime favors outbound innovation but restrains inbound innovation in pharmaceutical innovation...

In this paper we look into the modes for enhancing intuition suggested in the literature. Our starting point is that although the various intuition-enhancing techniques often work, it is rarely clear why. This also makes more systematic development of further techniques more difficult. First we provide a quick overview of the features of intuition...

The appropriability regime in India changed with the implementation of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement and the ensuing Patent Amendments Act 2005, leading to product patent regime. When faced with a change from process patent regime to product patent regime in 2005, local firms could either continue with the generics business f...

Creative process research has identified the role of certain cognitive abilities, affective processes, and personality traits in the creative process, but has accorded less emphasis to the role of aesthetic knowing in this process. In this study we contribute a set of empirical findings which portray that aesthetic knowledge plays a fundamental rol...

Gamification is a new, but an increasingly popular approach, which proved to be powerful in many areas, such as education and marketing, and has entered the area of internal corporate applications. This exploratory study is focused on a particular part of corporate environment – gamification being a medium of interactions of knowledge workers wit...

Appears in: INTED2016 Proceedings (browse) Pages: 5383-5386 Publication year: 2016 ISBN: 978-84-608-5617-7 ISSN: 2340-1079

This paper develops the founding elements of the concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) by elaborating on the learning processes happening at the heart of such communities. In particular, it provides a consistent perspective on the notions of knowledge and of knowledge sharing that is compatible with the ‘DNA’ of this concept, i.e. learning enta...

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the phenomenon of creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs in the organizational setting of their creative industry - haute cuisine. By capturing holistically the complexities and interactions of high-level creativity in high-performance settings, we endeavoured to illustrate how world-lea...

The Indian pharmaceutical sector grew spectacularly in a process patent regime, which enabled to entrench itself in the global market with generics and cost effective manufacturing processes. The legislative environment in India for the pharmaceutical sector underwent changes in 2005 leading to product patent protection. The sector was ready to emb...

In our current curriculum design project we are building on many-years of experience in designing curricula and starting new degree courses. We are particularly building on the methodological approach developed over the years, that can be summarised in the following five design concepts: the overall curriculum design process is ‘quasi-algorithmic’,...

This article sketches open innovation strategies pursued by eight Indian pharmaceutical firms and provides an account of strategic flexibility charted by firms in the wake of changes in the legislative environment. The findings examined through the lens of open innovation and dynamic capabilities identifies ‘technological competencies’ and ‘funding...

The role of formal education in general and of university education in particular is often discussed nowadays. We have engaged in this debate previously, arguing that although it is bound to change, university education is here to stay. We have developed a model of education, in which universities and corporate universities play complementary roles...

After 10 years in teaching a variety of topics in decision making one of the authors decided to develop a tool that can help decision makers to consolidate their knowledge around a particular decision problem. The three remaining authors have joined the R&D team over the next two decades; the work resulted in the Doctus knowledge-based system which...

We have recently visited the World’s largest building, the Boing manufacturing plant, and have seen the 787 ‘Dreamliner’. It is a beautiful aircraft. The engineers who designed it, just like those who designed the enormous building in which it is assembled, are clearly competent practitioners. How they achieved this high level of competence? They s...

The national environment in India for the pharmaceutical sector recently underwent changes with The Patents (Amendment) Act 2005, to comply with the TRIPS agreement leading to product patent protection. This spurred a lot of transformations within the Indian pharmaceutical innovation system in the form of policy initiatives by government, to promot...

“Disciples be damned”, Picasso once said, “It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.” And Nietzsche replied: “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” This dialogue is pure fiction but points towards an important yet underexplored...

This paper contributes to the debate about rigour and relevance in management and organization research. The contribution derives from an empirical inquiry into the managerial and organizational cognition of acknowledged experts in scientific research: Nobel Laureates. The research was conducted through in-depth unstructured interviews with, and ba...

In this conceptual paper we start from the conception of experience innovation as originally proposed by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2003) since this approach seems to contradict the assumption that entrepreneurship is a systematic behaviour based on concept and theory rather than a personality trait based on intuition (see Drucker, 2006). We attend to...

This chapter introduces Insider Explanatory Phenomenology (IEP) as viable approach to researching intuition in personal creativity. Drawing on a study elucidating experiences of personal creativity, the key contribution is to make explicit why IEP is particularly suitable for investigating context-dependent cognitive and nebulous phenomena such as...