Personal statement
I am a scholar, consultant, teacher, and speaker; my book What Every CEO Should Know About AI has just been published by the Cambridge University Press. My scholarly research focuses on talent, creativity, intuition, and the grandmaster-apprentice relationship. I conducted in-depth open-ended interviews with 20 top scientists, including17 Nobel Laureates and two Eckert-Mauchly Award winners, in order to understand the thinking of scientists at the highest level of mastery. As a practitioner, 1999-2004 I spearheaded the development of AI software, a knowledge-based expert system shell, compared various AI solutions, and explored the validity of AI. In my consultancy work, I advise companies on AI implementation to support complex decisions through modelling expert knowledge and on fostering grandmaster-apprentice relationships to improve organizational learning. I have been appointed member of the British Standard Institution's Artificial Intelligence Committee (BSI ART/001).
I am a Senior Lecturer in Information & Knowledge Management at the Department of Management Science, University of Strathclyde Business School, UK. I hold two Visiting Professor appointments; since 2009 at the Management Department, Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia, and since 2021 at the Doctoral School of Regional and Business Administration Sciences, Széchenyi University, Győr, Hungary.
My paper ‘Thinking together: What makes Communities of Practice work?’ became an instant classic, and is continuously one of the most read papers in Human Relations. Another paper ‘Understanding intuition: The case for two forms of intuition’ is one of the most read articles in Management Learning. To date, I have written 30+ journal papers, three books, 15 book chapters, and about 100 conference papers, and recently co-edited the Handbook of Research Methods on Creativity. I serve on the editorial boards of Management Learning and of Academy of Management Learning & Education.
Over the two and half years before the pandemic, I delivered 20 keynote and public talks on Human Mind and AI in New York, London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Lausanne, Birmingham, and Budapest, as well as a TEDx talk. My most recent talk in London is available from my YouTube channel. Based on my 20+ years of research, consultancy and teaching, I argue that in the areas requiring original thinking, extraordinary achievements will come from smart people being supported by smart technology.
My Google Scholar page
My Scopus page
My ResearcherID page
My ORCID page
My Acedmia.edu page
My ResearchGate page
My (official) Facebook page
My LinkedIn page
My Tweets
My YouTube channel
Teaching
Knowledge & Innovation Management (UG, MOOC)
I have recently developed a new knowledge and innovation management course organised around four themes: the structure of personal knowledge, the processes of personal knowing, the organisational aspects of knowledge management, and innovation in organisations. This topic also served as the starting point for developing my first MOOC ‘Understanding Modern Business & Organisations’.
Artificial Intelligence (UG, MSc, MBA, MOOC)
Teaching information systems from a managerial perspective in organisational context, my focus in Information Management is on the human-computer connection; i.e. what should be computerised and what left to humans. The covered technologies range from databases through expert systems, corporate portals and social media and collaboration tools to smart technologies and artificial intelligence. The most recent development of this topic is embodied in my second MOOC ‘Understanding Information & Technology Today’.
Making Strategy (MBA)
This class originally developed by Prof Colin Eden at Strathclyde, focuses on the process of strategy making using causal maps as transitional objects. The process is formalised, governed by procedural justice and procedural rationality. In this class ‘strategy’ is about agreeing where to focus energy, cash, effort, and emotion. Making Strategy is rooted in the personal construct theory, the resource-based view, competence-based management, emergent strategising, and solving messy problems.
Research Philosophy (doctoral level)
This is a compulsory module for all the research students at the University of Strathclyde Business School. A 5-day intensive classroom-based course is followed by a prolonged online collaborative learning in a virtual learning environment. I encourage students to develop their philosophical stance through independent thinking rather than finding their boxes.
Research interests
My ambitious aim is to develop a dynamic model and possibly theory of cognition. I have developed, with my collaborators, a model of knowledge levels which serves as a conceptual framework for the empirical investigation into the highest ‘grandmaster’ level of knowledge. To this end I conducted 20 in-depth unstructured interviews with grandmasters (17 with Nobel Laureates).
My research in knowledge modelling underlies the development of the Doctus knowledge-based expert system (KBS); resulting in new algorithms, software design, etc. Conversely, I use Doctus as a modelling tool in various other research topics. The process of knowledge engineering is also a research topic on its own right.
Towards a Dynamic Theory of Knowledge
Models of Personal Knowledge
- Types of personal knowledge
- Levels of personal knowledge
- Personal intuition
Models of Personal Knowing Processes
- Intuitive and integrated rationality
- Personal learning
- Personal creativity
Models of Trans-Personal Knowing Processes
- Knowledge sharing
- Master-apprentice relationship
- Executive coaching
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Philosophy of AI
- The future of AI
- Validation in expert systems
- Reductive reasoning in expert systems
Developing AI
- Hybrid AI
- Human + AI
- 3D concept mapping: Doctus Knowledge Galaxy
Using AI
- Coaching and kb-DSS
- Knowledge engineering and facilitating
- Modelling with Doctus KBS
Knowledge-based Strategizing
Managing innovation and knowledge
- Knowledge management
- Innovation management
- Gamification
Knowledge-based decision making
- Personal decisions
- Communities and practice
- Performance and quality
Research Philosophy and Methods
Philosophical approaches and frameworks
- Process philosophy
- Transdisciplinarity
- Investigating the extraordinary
Methodological approaches and frameworks
- Reflection and reflexivity
- Against methods
- Generalizability through iterative learning
Applied Research Methods
- Insider Explanatory Phenomenology
- Intuitive Cyclic Phenomenology
- Cognitive and causal mapping
Teaching-Learning-Education
Philosophy and Methods of Teaching and Learning
- Online teaching and learning
- Grandmaster-apprentice relationship
- Post-experiential education
Professional activities
- The Principle of Subsidiarity from a Transdisciplinary Perspective
- Keynote/plenary speaker
- 8/11/2016
- Understanding Modern Business and Organisations - 3rd run
- Organiser
- 22/2/2016
- Academy of Management (External organisation)
- Chair
- 17/4/2015
- Janders Dean Legal Knowledge Management & Innovation Forum
- Keynote/plenary speaker
- 15/5/2015
- ECEL 2013: 12th European Conference on E-Learning
- Keynote/plenary speaker
- 31/10/2013
- InterAct with AI
- Invited speaker
- 23/11/2022
More professional activities
Projects
- Grandmaster Project 1
- Dorfler, Viktor (Principal Investigator) Eden, Colin (Co-investigator)
- This project explores the cognitive complexity of people at the highest level of knowledge. The background to the project is a conceptual model of knowledge levels which identifies the highest level of knowledge as 'Grandmaster' level. The underlying assumption of the project is that people who got awarded the highest prize in their respective fields, such as the Nobel Prize, achieved the highest level of knowledge in their discipline - they are grandmasters.
- 01-Jan-2009 - 30-Jan-2015
- Hydrogen Accelerator
- Coffele, Federico (Principal Investigator) Burt, Graeme (Co-investigator) Dorfler, Viktor (Co-investigator) Harrington, Susan (Co-investigator)
- SE Grant Administered by St Andrews University - Match funding provided through RKES 211195
- 04-Jan-2021 - 30-Jan-2022
- Questionnaire Processing with Artificial Intelligence
- Dorfler, Viktor (Principal Investigator)
- 07-Jan-2020 - 09-Jan-2020
- Threshold Concepts across Knowledge Levels – Insights from How These Occur within Autistic People
- Dorfler, Viktor (Principal Investigator) Harrington, Susan (Post Grad Student) Akartunali, Kerem (Research Co-investigator)
- 01-Jan-2018
- Knowledge Management with System Thinking
- Dorfler, Viktor (Principal Investigator) MacBryde, Jillian (Co-investigator) Shpakova, Agnessa (Post Grad Student)
- Knowledge Management (KM) has been extensively researched for more than two decades, however the academic literature is still quite disjoined and fragmented. Companies keep facing repetitive KM-related problems that come at high cost, and the solutions that they find are often reduced to installing a new software package that is expected to facilitate knowledge flow across an organisation.
This research departs from a problem observed in practice – a failed KM project in an innovative company, and aims at understanding the reasons behind this failure. It then investigates KM within some of the most innovative companies in the energy sector in an attempt to address the questions found in practice and not answered by the academic literature. Subsequently it sets the following research goals, which help to address identified gaps in the literature: (1) to understand the KM journey that companies undertake, (2) to define the role of technology in this journey, and (2) to explore gamification as a possible contributing aspect of a developed solution.
The research adopts an iterative approach in a form of continuous dialogue between theory and practice, with multiple case study analysis as the research design of the main part of the empirical investigation. And as a result, it develops an organic roadmap of KM that depicts an evolution of KM in innovative companies at the example of the energy sector.
This research contributes of the body of knowledge by:
1. Describing a KM journey that innovative companies in the energy sector undertake in order to achieve excellence, and that consists of three phases: managing explicit knowledge, knowledge sharing and creating new knowledge.
2. Demonstrating that technological component (document repositories) is central to KM only in the first phase and becomes peripheral (with the most useful tool being wikis) starting from the second phase.
3. Opening a new area of research and suggesting that gamification might have a significant impact on KM that stretches far beyond motivation.
4. Questioning that maturity models are an appropriate framework to study the evolution of KM in an organisation.
The research contributes to practice by demonstrating that KM is a learning process rather than a one-time initiative and by creating realistic expectations from the technological support.
The extent of the contribution was discussed with the companies-participants of this study and the board of directors at Durham Energy Institute, being a validation of the findings. - 01-Jan-2013 - 04-Jan-2018
- Hot Spots for Knowledge Sharing in Healthcare
- Dorfler, Viktor (Principal Investigator) Eden, Colin (Co-investigator) Pyrko, Igor (Post Grad Student)
- 01-Jan-2011 - 10-Jan-2014
More projects
Address
Management Science
Duncan Wing
Duncan Wing
Location Map
View
University of Strathclyde
in a larger map