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Karlshochschule combines business, society, and culture to create an international and practice-oriented study program.

Contact

  • Karlstraße 36 – 38, 76133 Karlsruhe, DE
  • +49 721 48095 0
  • info@karlshochschule.de
  • Mo. – Fr. 8:30 – 17:00 Uhr

Prof. Dr. Dirk Nicolas Wagner

Professor of Strategic Management

Dirk asks a question most AI commentary skips: what happens to the firm itself? Not which jobs disappear, but what a company is once decisions are made partly by machines — who holds authority, where accountability sits, and what an economic order looks like when some of the actors in it are not human. He was writing about software agents as economic participants in 2000, two decades before the topic became unavoidable, and he spent the years in between running businesses.

The economics of a firm with machines in it

Dirk’s research applies institutional economics to artificial intelligence — a combination that turns out to be unusually productive. If the theory of the firm rests on contracts, incentives and the costs of coordination, what happens when one party to the arrangement is an algorithm? His published work covers the nature of the artificially intelligent firm, economic governance where humans and AI work side by side, and what he calls the opportunistic principal. It is a genuinely economic treatment of AI rather than a technological or ethical one, and it produces different answers.

Nudging, and its gentler dangers

A recurring thread in his work is AI-enabled nudging: systems that shape behaviour without instructing it. Dirk has written on its emergence and design, on achieving corporate social responsibility through it, and on what he terms the dark side of management in automated environments. He is not a pessimist about the technology. He is precise about where its power is easy to miss — which makes him a useful person to study strategy with.

Twenty years of running things

Before academia, Dirk was Managing Partner at WWV Wärmeverwertung in Bremen, Chairman and Finance Director of ThyssenKrupp Palmers in Coventry, and held roles in mergers and acquisitions, regional management and business development across ThyssenKrupp, polymerce and VEBA. He also researches why large projects fail — drawing lessons from aviation’s approach to error and risk. When he teaches project management, the cases are not hypothetical.

Teaching that has won prizes

Dirk takes teaching methodology seriously enough to publish on it: on contextual learning in management studies, and on how to make lecturing with slides interactive rather than deadening. His company projects module placed fourth for the Ars legendi Prize for Excellent University Teaching, awarded by the Stifterverband. He has been at Karlshochschule since September 2013, teaching strategic management, general management, project management and institutional economics.

The question isn't whether machines will take the jobs. It's what a firm becomes when machines are part of it.

Facts, figures and the full CV

  • At the university since 1 September 2013
  • Strategic management
  • General management
  • Project management
  • Institutional economics
  • Strategy, organisation and artificial intelligence
  • Economic order for people and machines
  • Project management
  • Doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.), University of Fribourg, Switzerland — Economics and Computer Science
  • MBA International Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
  • Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (lic. rer. pol.)
  • Journalism studies (Honors Diploma), London School of Journalism, UK
  • Managing Partner, WWV Wärmeverwertung GmbH & Co, Bremen
  • Chairman and Finance Director, ThyssenKrupp Palmers Ltd, Coventry, UK
  • Commercial Regional Manager, ThyssenKrupp Xervon GmbH, Ingolstadt
  • Mergers & Acquisitions Officer, ThyssenKrupp Serv AG, Düsseldorf
  • Director Business Development, polymerce AG, Essen
  • Analyst, Group Development, VEBA AG, Düsseldorf
  • Expert in accreditation procedures, ZEvA (Central Evaluation and Accreditation Agency), Hanover
  • Co-editor, ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy
  • Scholarship holder, Swiss National Science Foundation
  • Chevening Scholar, British Foreign and Commonwealth Office

  • Books

    • Stephens, M., Vashishtha, H. & Wagner, D. N. (2023). AI Enabled Business: A Smart Decision Kit. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2001). Software Agents and Liberal Order: An Inquiry Along the Borderline Between Economics and Computer Science. Miami: Universal Publishers.

    Peer-reviewed journal articles

    • Wagner, D. N. (2021). On the emergence and design of AI nudging: The gentle big brother? ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy, 2, 18.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the dark side of management. ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy, 1, 10.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2020). The nature of the artificially intelligent firm: An economic investigation into changes that AI brings to the firm. Telecommunications Policy, 44(6), special issue on artificial intelligence, economy and society.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2020). Strategically managing the artificially intelligent firm. Strategy & Leadership, 48(3).
    • Wagner, D. N. (2020). Economic patterns in a world with artificial intelligence. Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, 1–21.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2020). Augmented human-centered management: Human resource development for highly automated business environments. Journal of Human Resource Management, XXIII(1).
    • Wagner, D. N. (2019). The opportunistic principal. Kyklos, 72(4).
    • Papke, T. & Wagner, D. N. (2017). Agile workplace innovation. European Journal of Workplace Innovation, 3(2), 67–86.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2015). The tragedy of the attentional commons: In search of social rules for an increasingly fragmented space. Journal of New Frontiers in Spatial Concepts, 7, 31–41.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2000). Liberal order for software agents? An economic analysis. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 3(1).
    • Wagner, D. N. (2000). Software agents take the internet as a shortcut to enter society: A survey of new actors to study for social theory. First Monday, 5(7).

    Book chapters

    • Wagner, D. N. (2023). Achieving CSR with artificially intelligent nudging. In Schmidpeter & Altenburger (eds.), Responsible Artificial Intelligence. Springer, Cham.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2021). Augmented human-centered management: Personnel development for highly automated business areas. In Altenburger & Schmidpeter (eds.), CSR and Artificial Intelligence. Springer Gabler.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2020). Economic AI literacy: Source of global competitive advantage. In Christiansen & Škrinjarić (eds.), Handbook of Research on Applied AI for International Business and Marketing Applications, 135–152. IGI Global.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2020). Economic governance when humans and AI are at work. In Munoz & Naqvi (eds.), Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation. Anthem Press.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2017). Graceful degradation and the knowledge worker. In Küpers, Sonnenburg & Zierold (eds.), Re-Thinking Management. Springer VS.

    Project management

    • Wagner, D. N. (2017). Learning from aviation project resource management to avoid project failure. PM World Journal, VI(2).
    • Wagner, D. N. (2016). Breakin’ the project wave: Understanding and avoiding failure in project management. PM World Journal, V(1).
    • Wagner, D. N. & Scheiderer, J. (2016). No way off the ground: Learning from aviation — avoiding and managing crises in projects. 33rd International Project Management Forum, Nuremberg.

    Teaching and didactics

    • Wuttke-Hilke, I., Wagner, D. N. & Widmayer, F. (2020). Anchored instruction 2020 — from instruction to construction: Contextual learning in management studies. die hochschullehre.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2017). Bulletproof: From delivery to interactivity when teaching with PowerPoint. International Journal of Innovation in Education, 4(1), 16–31.
    • Wagner, D. N. (2017). Introductory & advanced company projects. Ars legendi Prize for Excellent University Teaching, 4th place. Stifterverband.

    Selected practitioner publications and keynotes

    • Regular contributor to zukunftsInstitut, Frankfurt am Main, on AI and management (2016–2021), including Nudging through AI: The gentle big brother (2021), The artificially intelligent company (2019) and Colleague AI: Who controls the working world of tomorrow? (2018)
    • Keynote, The evolution and economics of AI, NXTWRK Convention, Siemens AG (2020)
    • Keynote, Making mistakes and managing risks, PM Forum of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Königstein (2017)
    • Contributions to Personal Manager, IM+io and Health@Work; panel participation at the AIxIA Conference, Karlsruhe

    The full publication list is available on request.

Want to study with Dirk?

He teaches strategic management, general management, project management and institutional economics, and supervises theses on AI, organisation and strategy. Come to an info day, sit in on a session, or write to him directly.

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