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Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.

What kind of knowledge is needed by information specialists working in a specific subject field like medicine, sociology or music? What approaches have been used in information science to produce kinds of domain‐specific knowledge? This article presents 11 approaches to domain analysis. Together these approaches make a unique competence for information specialists. The approaches are: producing literature guides and subject gateways; producing special classifications and thesauri; research on indexing and retrieving specialities; empirical user studies; bibliometrical studies; historical studies; document and genre studies; epistemological and critical studies; terminological studies, LSP (languages for special purposes), discourse studies; studies of structures and institutions in scientific communication; and domain analysis in professional cognition and artificial intelligence. Specific examples and selective reviews of literature are provided, and the strengths and drawbacks of each of these approaches are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to describe phenomenological approaches to studying entrepreneurs and their behaviors. The goal is to illustrate how phenomenology can provide a complement especially to the cognitive and discursive approaches that are common in the field today.

Conceptual review.

Cognitive and discursive approaches typically seek coherent explanations of entrepreneurial behaviors by grounding them in intra-individual cognitions or extra-individual discourses. Phenomenology on the other hand seeks to capture more fully the richness of individuals’ lived experiences. While some degree of scientific reduction is inevitable in all empirical research, such reduction is also accompanied by the risk of ignoring essential insights, something that has potentially damaging implications for theoretical and meta-theoretical development as well as for practice. Phenomenological methods are thus well suited to develop new insights and to challenge and add nuance to existing, often more normative and structurally oriented, theories.

The review of the literature focusses on representative studies and is therefore not comprehensive.

Research based on a richer appreciation of entrepreneurs’ lived experiences can inform both policy and more directly the design of specific support structures.

Research based on a richer appreciation of entrepreneurs’ lived experiences can inform both policy and more directly the design of specific support structures.

This paper provides a novel discussion of the limitations of cognitive and discursive approaches by relating them to the phenomenological tradition. More generally, it identifies the potential conflict between coherent theoretical explanations and rich appreciation of the entrepreneurial life-world, as a central methodological concern in the entrepreneurship field.

The emerging perspectives of entrepreneurial ecosystems, bricolage and effectuation highlight the interaction between the entrepreneur and the surrounding community, and its potential for creative resource acquisition and utilization. However, empirical work on how this process actually unfolds remains scarce. This paper aims to study the interaction between the opportunity construction process and the development of resources in the surrounding ecosystem.

This paper is a qualitative analysis of the extreme case of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society (Aaltoes), a newly founded organization successfully promoting entrepreneurship within a university merger with virtually no resources, based on interviews of six key contributors and four stakeholder organizations.

The opportunity construction process both supported and was supported by two key resource generating mechanisms. Formulating and opportunistically reformulating the agenda for increasing potential synergy laid the groundwork for mutual benefit. Proactive concretization enhanced both initial resource allocation and sustaining input to the process through offering tangible instances of specific opportunities and feedback.

Although based on a single case study in a university setting, proactive concretization emerges as a promising direction for further investigations of the benefits and dynamics of entrepreneur–ecosystem interaction in the opportunity construction process.

Intentionally creating beneficial entrepreneur–ecosystem interaction and teaching proactive concretization becomes a key goal for educators of entrepreneurship.

The paper extends an understanding of creative resource generation and utilization in the opportunity construction process. The role of proactive concretization was emphasized in the interaction of the entrepreneur and the ecosystem, creating virtuous spirals of entrepreneurial activity.

The field of global leadership has flourished and advanced in the preceding decade. However, in contrast to the term global leadership, which enjoys conceptual clarity enabling accumulative progress, the construct of global leadership effectiveness is comparatively undertheorized, with instances of definitional ambiguity and disjointed methodological operationalizations across studies. The purpose of this chapter is, thus, to provide a systematic review of the global leadership effectiveness literature. In doing so, our contributions are fourfold. First, we offer an inclusive, comprehensive definition of global leadership effectiveness. Second, we map its construct domain. Third, we review research findings at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Finally, we integrate extant insights and offer suggestions for future research, organized within the typology of the content domain along the identified dimensions of global leadership effectiveness. Together, our goal is to build a foundation for future research examining the roles of leadership and the global context as antecedents of global leadership effectiveness.

The rapidly growing body of global leadership literature still lacks research on both global change and global leader cognition. This chapter presents two case studies describing large-scale global change efforts led by expert global leaders. This is complemented with the results of cognitive task analysis interviews with the two expert global leaders. The findings include task diagrams of the change process they employed and knowledge audits of the most difficult cognitive step in the change processes they led. The audit identifies the elements of expert cognition they utilized, the cues and strategies they employed, and the perceived difficulties novices would experience in similar situations. The findings confirm previous research, solidifying the role and nature of expert cognition in global leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the implications our analysis holds for research and practice.

Most of us believe that entrepreneurs are special. We do this because both scholars and practitioners tell us so.

In this chapter, we show how our understanding of global leadership can be enriched by applying research on expert decision making. We review Klein's model of expert decision making and other research on expert cognition. Then we apply these findings to show how the decision-making processes of expert global leaders might differ from those of novice leaders. Finally, we suggest directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to report on experiences and reflect on challenges in transdisciplinary technology foresight as exemplified by cognition and robotics research.

The study was conducted as a broad transdisciplinary process involving users and producers of robot technology solutions as well as scientists and other experts in cognition and robotics. Transdisciplinarity is understood as the transcendence of disciplinary modes together with the involvement and participation of non‐scientists in problem formulation and knowledge provision. The study focuses on the possibilities for innovation at the crossroads where robotics and cognition meet.

The paper reflects on the following methodological issues: medium‐ and long‐term research and innovation possibilities and barriers in a transdisciplinary context; the classification and framing of transdisciplinary fields; the facilitation of technology foresight processes; and the trustworthiness of the foresight process and its recommendations.

The results have been disseminated among relevant advisory and grant‐awarding bodies within research and innovation, relevant knowledge institutions and universities, and companies on both the development and user sides of the technologies.

The paper contributes to European experiences on national‐level foresight exercises. The conceptual findings of the case study are of value to science and innovation policy makers, foresight practitioners and scholars within the field.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the core dimensions of problem solving of experts in commercial valuation in order to provide a rich stimulus for managing current practice and enabling future development.

The study adopted a cognitive position but emphasised understanding the everyday commercial property valuation practice in a naturalistic context and from the participants’ perspectives. Given this, a grounded theory approach was employed as a research strategy to guide the data collection and surface theoretical interpretations. Data were obtained through in-depth interviews with practicing valuers working in private real estate firms within metropolitan Birmingham, UK.

The interviews uncover four dimensions of experts’ problem-solving practice in commercial valuation: multidimensional, domain-specific knowledge base; cognitive process that is centred on analysis and reflection; collaborative problem-solving venture with colleagues; and professional practice issues awareness. A conceptual model is proposed which integrates these dimensions enabling a clearer understanding of the nature of valuation work.

This study was designed to be descriptive and theory generating, thus, the findings cannot be generalised as the sample was confined to one city and consists of a small number of senior practicing valuers. Therefore, the findings may not be fully applicable to other practicing valuers, other geographical locations or more widely to other types of property valuation. Nevertheless, the findings provide an important cognitive framework which can be verified by other researchers seeking to examine the practice of expert valuers.

The identification of the core dimensions of expert problem solving in commercial property valuation is shown to have implications for valuation practice, education and continued research. The valuation practice environments need to develop mechanisms to provide time that would enable these multi-dimensions of professional competence to be developed. Further work is needed to expand and refine the model across expert practice in other specialty areas of valuation practice.

This study expands the current understanding of valuation process to areas of expertise that have received less coverage in behavioural valuation literature, that is, the central role of knowledge and cognition and how these are integrated for effective valuation problem solving and decision making.