SBIR Phase I: Cognitive Agility Assessment Tool

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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project concerns the development of an assessment tool that will enable users to profile a decision-maker's cognitive agility and expertise in high-level business situations. It is appropriate for evaluating decision makers in organizations and for evaluating students. It is based on results from WTRI's recent basic research that has uncovered mechanisms that may be involved in the determination of business expertise. It uses knowledge elicitation technology that WTRI has developed over several years to support research on the identification of intuitive expertise (in the sense of Dreyfus, 1997). The project outlines a plan to develop an on-line internet based version that is self-scoring and has been tested among well-known experts. The product will also be field-tested for its ability to predict general vs. industry specific expertise. The expected outcome is an easy to administer technology that can used by professional evaluators, professors, students or individuals and will assist in staff development and education. The profiles of expertise generated by the product will identify hidden strengths, areas of weakness, and suggestions for further development. A long-term goal is to create versions that can be distributed by qualified resellers and universities. In the current climate of rapid workplace change, decision-makers need to continually evaluate their ability to adapt to changes and re-invent their organization's value and competitive future. Few assessment tools address the cognitive underpinnings involved in the skill set involved. Rather, they evaluate personal traits or sub-skills that have some correlation with leadership, broadly defined. Using an empirically verified model of expertise in business strategy development and performance prediction, WTRI has built an assessment tool that locates an individual against this model, much like chess players are evaluated against a notion of a Chess Grand Master. When applied to individual client situations, this tool has shown itself to have powerful predictive capability and has successfully informed staff development efforts. Its distinctive feature is assessment of the ability to analyze disparate sources of information in order to make strategy level decisions and supporting tactical plans. Making it more widely available and usable by non-scientists would greater contribute to efforts to increase the performance of both organizations and decision makers. Organizations, distributors and several institutions of higher learning have expressed interest in this project to address what they consider to be an unmet need area.