Post by Chair of Information Systems and Systems Engineering (WISE)

🎓 Successful Dissertation Defense by Eva Zahn 🎓 On 8 December 2025, Eva Maria Zahn successfully defended her dissertation titled “Structuring the Unstructured. Designing AI Based and Interactive Environments for Negotiation Training” at the Universität Kassel. 🎉 Her work focuses on how negotiation skills can be systematically supported and trained. 🤝 Negotiations are becoming increasingly frequent in professional life due to global collaboration and flatter hierarchies, and they are essential for success in modern organizations. Eva examines negotiation as a soft skill that combines metacognitive decision making and socio emotional abilities and emphasizes integrative tactics that focus on collaboration, long term relationships, and mutual benefits. The perspective shifts from winning against others to creating win win outcomes. ✅ The dissertation yields several key implications for research and practice. 📚 It structures soft skills as a research domain, presents a theory driven framework for negotiation skill training, and reframes negotiation preparation as a structured task that can be digitally supported. Moreover, it offers design knowledge for AI supported preparation systems and demonstrates domain specific support for entrepreneurial negotiations in high stakes contexts such as venture capital term sheet negotiations. 💼🤖 We would also like to sincerely thank the dissertation committee for their time, thoughtful questions, and valuable feedback: Edona Elshan Christoph Seckler, Jens Klusmeyer and Prof. Dr. Gerrit Hornung, LL.M. 🙏 After the successful defense, Eva received the traditional doctoral hat. 🎩 Created by colleagues from the Chair of Information Systems and Systems Engineering (WISE) and presented by her first supervisor Matthias Söllner, it reflects shared experiences and memorable moments from her journey as a doctoral researcher. We are truly proud of Eva, our first doctor at the WISE chair. 🌟 It has been a pleasure to accompany her on this journey and we are excited to see where her path will lead next. 🚀👏 #NegotiationTraining #SoftSkills #AIinEducation #Entrepreneurship #TeamWISE #UniversityOfKassel