Factors of attention

The importance of the role of attention is widely recognized not only by psychologists but also among academics and managers involved in knowledge management. It has become the bottleneck of the performance of white-collar workers. The previous studies of attention in the field of knowledge management primarily concerned with getting the attention of the individuals and/or groups. However, for the process of knowledge increase it is also important that we are able to pay attention – and there is no white-collar work without knowledge increase. There are many factors influencing our attention. This paper examines the factors along the dimensions of cognition and motivation only; the environmental impacts (like noise) are not investigated. The role of love and the muse – the emotional involvement – is discussed in detail. The result of the paper is a descriptive model of attention, which is then simulated with Doctus knowledge-based system. The model presented here (both, the descriptive and the simulative ones) is offered to discussion aiming to gain expert validation and fine-tuning

Intelligent customer relationship management (ICRM) by EFLOW portal

Customer relationship management (CRM) has become a strategic initiative aimed at getting, growing, and retaining the right customers. A great amount of numeric data and even more soft information are available about customers. The strategy of building and maintaining customer relations can be described with 'if… then' rules acquired from experts. Doctus Knowledge-Based System provides a new and simplified approach in the field of knowledge management. It is able to cope with tacit and implicit rules at the same time, so decision makers can clearly see the satisfactory solution (then and there). It reasons both deductive and inductive, so it enables the user to check on the model graph why is the chosen solution in the given situation most appropriate. It is upgradeable with in telligent portal, which presents the personalized (body-tailored) information for decision makers. When we need some hard data from a database or a data warehouse, we have automatic connection between case input interface and the database. Doctus recognizes the relations between the data, it selects them and provides only the needed rules to the decision maker. Intelligent portal puts our experience on the web, so our knowledge base is constantly improving with new 'if… then' rules. We support decision mak ing with two interfaces. On the Developer Interface the attributes, the values and the 'if… then' rules can be modified. The intelligent portal is used as a managerial decision support tool. This interface can be used without seeing the knowledge base, we only see the personalized soft information. ICRM (intelligent Customer Relationship Management) helps customer to get the requested information quickly. It is also capable of customizing the questionnaires, so the customer doesn't have to answer irrelevant questions and the decision maker doesn't have to read endless reports

Innovation of extraordinary chefs : development process or systemic phenomenon?

A highly rated current study on culinary innovation was found to be too product- and service-oriented and narrow, more appropriate to describe the culinary craft than the culinary art Creativity seems to be put into a box and is sold as a well-structured task. Creativity, however, is an ill-structured problem solving and a systemic phenomenon. It requires social validation from the gatekeepers of the domain and if accepted changes an existing domain or transforms an existing domain into a new one. These theoretical findings were supported by selected empirical data from 19 phenomenological interviews with extraordinary chefs from the UK, France, Spain, Austria and Germany. It emerged from the interview analysis that culinary innovation is more than just product or service development and that extraordinary chefs use ill-structured problem solving. Finally, it was shown that the field and the domain have significant influence on the individual chef and her/his creations

Understanding creativity

We have never seen creativity. More precisely, we have never seen the creative process; what we have seen is the creative individual (ex ante) and the outcome of creativity (ex post). Therefore we try to understand creativity by examining creative individuals and their creations. In this paper we only consider the creation of new knowledge. We draw on a wide variety of backgrounds. We wander into the area of cognitive psychology to investigate who is talented for creativity. We also draw on arts, history and philosophy of science, stories of mystics, some great novels and essays we have read as well as our experience in both working with creatives and creating new knowledge. Based on this shaky foundation we will describe creativity as illumination, through jokes, as a quest for harmony, as being kissed by the muse

Educating for misbehaviour in a well-behaved world : Reflective dialogue on two years' experience of the Transdisciplinary Doctoral School

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 another two years in implementation, disregarding the three problems that affect any form of doctoral education, we can say that specific problem of the transdisciplinary doctoral school concerns the teachers. There is no established way for teachers to learn how to assess the progress of transdisciplinary doctoral students. If the teachers use their experience from interdisciplinary doctoral education then that creates problems, if they don’t, they will suffer from the "The Emperor’s New Clothes" effect. It would be a mistake to develop an algorithm now. It is the smaller problem of algorithms that we don’t know enough yet; the bigger problem is that, nurturing the doctoral students should be non-algorithmic. We should not fall in the trap of the industrial culture, trying to make everything algorithmic. We argue that only those can fly out from the cages of their disciplines, who were ever inside one. Those who were never had their native discipline cannot become transdisciplinary. There is only one way of being in a disciplinary cage: one needs to know the fundamental concepts and the relationships between them. In contrast, there are many different ways of leaving the disciplinary cages: everyone creates metaphors from their own meta-knowledge. This leads to the source of the only specific problem of transdisciplinary doctoral schools: the doctoral students may and often will use different metaphors than their teachers. If they simply reiterated the metaphors of their teachers, that would be detrimental to the originality of the final report (e.g. dissertation). We cannot say that any and all metaphors by the doctoral students are suitable, but it would be equally wrong to say that each of them is wrong

Understanding intuition : the case for two forms of intuition

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 concerning many aspects of intuition, the role of intuition in creativity remains comparatively under-researched. Through an extensive review of intuition literature, including but also going beyond the management field, we believe that a reason for this could be that intuition in the management literature is generally conceptualized as judgement. In this paper we aim to extend our understanding of intuition in creativity by introducing the concept of intuitive insight. Augmenting the literature and further strengthening the case this paper builds off two previous research projects. The first project focuses on presenting a comprehensive set of features of intuition based on the literature and the second builds a conceptual model of knowledge types. Further informing the research presented in this paper is Polanyi’s distinction of focal and subsidiary awareness. These four considerations lead us to propose that there are two kinds of intuition – intuitive judgement and intuitive insight

Facts, skills and intuition : A typology of personal knowledge

This paper introduces a knowledge model in which the types of knowledge are formed according to the nature of knowledge. First we use Ryle’s distinction of “that” and “how” knowledge, to which we add further three types. The five knowledge types are then synthesized using Polanyi’s distinction of focal and subsidiary awareness. The resulting model distinguishes three types of knowledge, the facts, the skills, and the intuition; all three having focal and subsidiary parts. We believe that this knowledge model is comprehensive in the sense that can classify any knowledge and it also has great explanatory power, as it is demonstrated through illustrative examples. Moreover, the model is elegant and easy to use, which facilitates our understanding of the domain of personal knowledge. Therefore we expect our findings to be useful for both researchers and educators in the field of knowledge and knowledge management

Fishing for meta-knowledge : a case for transdisciplinary validation

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 created, two additional problems appear. On the one hand, the new knowledge links to concepts in more than one discipline, which are thus likely to belong to different intellectual traditions. On the other hand, the new knowledge does not belong to any of these disciplines, and thus the usual ways of validating fail us. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper we choose the electric car (represented by the Tesla), which we look at from the viewpoint of mathematics, physics, psychology, and economics. For each discipline we consider a simplistic approach that we label ‘dogma’ and a more sophisticated approach that we label ‘philosophy’. We speculate about how new knowledge can be created within these disciplines as well as in a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner. Then we examine the problem of validating transdisciplinary knowledge. We conceptualise a three-step validation process for the new transdisciplinary knowledge and show how it can be supported using a knowledge-based expert system. Originality/value – Validating is always a difficult problem in academic research but in the case of transdisciplinary knowledge, it gains an additional level of complexity. In contrast, practitioners validate all the time, and their validation is nearly always transdisciplinary. Furthermore, what works well in academic research is validating experimental findings and similar results based on hard evidence. There are continuous attempts to develop validation principles in qualitative research but there is still no agreement or guidelines on how to execute validation correctly or, at least, in an acceptable way. Validating in case of conceptual results is virtually non-existent. The little that exists can be reduced to examining the consistency of new knowledge with the existing disciplinary knowledge. Therefore in this paper we initiate what can be a long journey of developing principles of validation in the case of new transdisciplinary knowledge resulting from a conceptual inquiry. This is what we call validating meta-knowledge. Practical implications – We believe that the most significant implication of our work in transdisciplinary validation will be education, particularly at the highest doctoral level. However, we also believe that creative problem solvers, academics and practitioners alike will also benefit from a better understanding of transdisciplinary validation

Experience-based innovation : intuitive expertise in creative professions

The paper examines the connection between the concepts of 'experience innovation' and 'creative intuition', arguing that future research on experience innovation cannot neglect the notion of intuition

Automated fuzzy-clustering for Doctus expert system

Our Knowledge-Based Expert System Shell 'Doctus'1 is capable of deduction also called rule-based reasoning and of induction, which is the symbolic version of reasoning by cases2 . If connected to databases or data warehouses the inductive reasoning of Doctus is also used for data mining. To handle numerical domains Doctus uses statistical clustering algorithm. We define the problem in three steps: how to perform a clustering, which is neither rigid nor sensitive to noise, benefiting from the properties of the application domain, reducing the complexity as much as possible, and supplying the decision maker with useful information enabling the possibility of interaction? In this paper we present the conception of Automated FuzzyClustering using triangular and trapezoidal Fuzzy-sets, which provides overlapping Fuzzy-set covering of the domain