Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human well-being. Hence understanding citizens' needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens' needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it

Characterising Human Capital in the Craft Industry

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in Europe's economy. Since SMEs have distinct organisational practices and structures (e.g. owner-run, continuity over several generations, regional engagement), their intellectual capital (IC) differs from large enterprises. However, there is little research on IC in SMEs. Placing special attention on the craft industry, this research aims at closing this gap. It will present a cross-disciplinary review of research on craft to explore the role of knowledge and human capital in the craft industry. The findings point to overall characteristics which can guide future research and inform policy-making in the craft industry

The Ever-Changing Personality: Revisiting the Concept of Triple-Loop Learning

Purpose - Considering personality as changeable through a bottom-up process of altering states, habits and traits, constitutes a shift in the predominant paradigm within personality psychology. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider Bateson's theory of learning and organizational triple-loop learning in light of this recent empirical evidence. Design/methodology/approach - This paper uses a multi-disciplinary conceptual approach. Based on an integrative analysis of literature from recent work in personality psychology, four dimensions (process, content, time and context) are identified that allow linking personality change and triple-loop learning. Findings - Identifying a bottom-up process of changing states, habits and traits as being central to change personality, allows for reconsidering Bateson's theory of learning as a theory of personality development (Learning II) and personality change (Learning III). Functionally equivalent, organizational triple-loop learning is conceptualized as a change in an organization's identity over time that may be facilitated through a change in responding to events and a change in the organization's routines. Practical implications - Interventions that change how organizations respond to events and that change the routines within an organization may be suitable to facilitate triple-loop learning in terms of changing organizational identity over time. Originality/value - This paper contributes to the discussion on Bateson's theory of learning and organizational triple-loop learning. As interest in personality change grows in organization studies, this paper aims to transfer these findings to organizational learning

Designing a Tool to Assess Professional Competences: Theoretical Foundations and Potential Applications

This conceptual paper outlines the descriptive theoretical foundations or kernel theories for designing an information and communication technology (ICT) tool to assess professional competences in the Austrian trade and craft sector. Upon completion, the ICT-tool serves as a boundary object in which applicants and assessors can interact. While this paper consists of a literature review and conceptual discussion, the overall project is methodologically placed within a multidisciplinary design-science paradigm. Design science scaffolds and structures the development of a theoretical model, the generation of assessment-items and the ICT-tool itself. This paper discusses the necessary descriptive knowledge or kernel theories on which the design of the ICT-tool rests. First, we describe the validation of prior learning - a process advocated by the European Union to make professional competences visible. Second, we describe the process how professional competences come about: through formal, non-formal and informal learning. Subsequently, we outline a knowledge-driven discourse on professional competences and discuss how different definitions of professional competence afford different approaches for its assessment. By presenting a use-case, we outline how the ICT-tool may guide applicants and assessors through this process

A knowledge perspective on needs to enhance organizational learning

Organizational learning causes organizational change. Different descriptive models have been proposed, but little research on variables influencing these processes has been done. Needs govern our behavior and motivate our acting. It has been shown that their identification and satisfaction effect value-creating and knowledge-intensive activities, such as innovation processes, strategy development, and product design. However, needs are usually implicitly anchored in organizations and people can hardly articulate them. Despite the fact that a focus on needs does not prescribe any concrete strategy, but extends opportunities to act, an initial consideration of needs often lacks. Consequently, their role as an influencing variable for organizational learning has not been investigated yet. Addressing this gap, this dissertation explores the nature of needs and how they can enhance organizational learning processes. It introduces a novel theory on needs for organizational practice which emphasizes the potential of a focus on needs. It argues why considering needs is beneficial for learning initiatives, such as vision or strategy development, in which various expectations which presumably emerge from shared needs have to be combined. Shared needs within a social system can trigger organizational learning and facilitate the design of new consensual satisfaction strategies (satisfiers). The theory allows for understanding the motivational forces of organizational learning and exploiting the postulated one-to-many relation between needs and satisfiers. Moreover, it points at influencing variables for the organizational transition from needs to need satisfaction and illustrates that by a knowledge perspective resulting in the concept of "need-based solution knowledge". This knowledge enables people to propose viable satisfiers in organizations. We introduce the methodological framework "Bewextra" that targets at the capacity to identify needs in organizations. It rests upon theories from various scientific fields and utilizes "learning from an envisioned future" as a core method. This enables to literally envision a desired future scenario in which all needs are intuitively fulfilled, and thereby allows for the creation of knowledge about needs. The research follows the action research paradigm which proposes a combinational interplay between rational and empirical research processes, in which various (qualitative) research methods are used. Besides theoretical considerations, the dissertation reports about four research projects in which the theories and methods were applied, reflected, and refined. More specifically, it presents how "Bewextra" was implemented and adjusted and demonstrates that a combination of conventional learning from the past and "learning from an envisioned future" enhances the outcome of organizational learning in various domains. Moreover, it investigates the differences between organizational strategies, that emerge with reference to needs, and strategies, that are developed without explicitly considering needs

Towards a prioritization of needs to support decision making in organizational change processes

A focus on needs and the ability to generate knowledge about needs is highly valuable for organizations because it extends the range of possible solutions and therefore enables them to create more innovative and sustainable products and services. Our paper will explore how a framework based on an abductive reasoning process for the creation and discovery of knowledge about needs in organizations can look like and what the main steps of such a framework are, in order to integrate this approach into the model of the knowledge-based firm. Moreover we will present empirical findings from a project with Austrian companies where this framework has been used

Extending the Organizational Learning Process in Order to Enable Innovative Ideas

Innovation processes require organizations to transcend current boundaries. These include not only technological as well as social limitations but -above all- the way we address the future. We are used to face the future with our existing knowledge and experiences from the past. This strategy, however, can hardly lead to knowledge off the beaten path. We therefore suggest a new learning approach for organizations which enables to literally envision a desired future scenario and thus, allows for the creation of radical new knowledge. In this paper we focus on organizational learning towards the future and compare its output with traditional learning from the past. Based on the idea of Learning from the Future (Greenleaf, 1977; Jaworski, 1998; C. O. Scharmer & Kaeufer, 2013; Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers., 2005) we extend the organizational learning process with an additional source of learning. By interacting with an ideal envisioned future, individuals are enabled to detach particularly from their doubts, concerns and restrictions grounded in their past experiences, which in turn clarifies the necessary actions to realize this desired scenario. We have been successfully applying Learning from Interacting with an Envisioned Future, in short Learning from an Envisioned Future, to various problem settings and different project sizes. (Kaiser, Fordinal, & Kragulj, 2014) We argue that our method leads to new knowledge which generally yields a higher degree of novelty and radicalness. In order to support our assumption we present our findings from comparing the output of Learning from an Envisioned Future and learning from the past. For this study we use data from an on ongoing organizational learning project we are currently conducting with a high school in Austria. (Kaiser & Kragulj, 2015) To investigate whether the approaches lead to considerably different results in terms of quality and quantity we apply the Paradigm Relatedness Framework by Nagasundaram & Bostrom (1994). By using this method, we assess the novelty and degrees of "radical change" for the system induced by the individual ideas and compare the overall output in a systematic way. The research question of our paper is the following: How does the use of Learning from Interacting with an Envisioned Future as an additional learning mode support the quality and quantity of innovative ideas? Does the output of both learning modes differ in terms of quality and quantity so that they could be used together in order to provide a more holistic knowledge creation? Initial findings suggest that Learning from an Envisioned Future does produce significantly more output modifying the dominant paradigms in the school system compared to the output we gained from the conventional learning approach. Thus, we reason that Learning from an Envisioned Future yields more potential to knowledge that can be regarded as radically new. Our paper will be structured in the following way. Firstly, we will discuss the theoretical background of our advanced approach of Learning from an Envisioned Future. Secondly, we will describe the ongoing research project with an Austrian high school as a qualitative case study. Subsequently, we will extensively compare the results of the two learning approaches we facilitated in the case study in terms of their quantity and quality measured by the Paradigm Relatedness Framework

Revealing the Purpose of a Stakeholder Organisation: The Case of a Public University Responding to the COVID-19 'Corona' Crisis

In early March 2020, Austria declared a state of emergency due to COVID-19. Social life was put on hold, public and private organisations were largely shut down, and universities had to adapt their operations. A group of WU academics investigate how one of Europe's biggest public universities in business and economics responded to the crisis and in the process rediscovered its core purpose