From Discrete Skills to Holistic Creative Human Potential: An Emerging Approach in Theory and Practice

Abstract

The study aims to empirically demonstrate and conceptually interpret the manifestations of an emerging approach to the issues of human capital, its measurement and development on the international academic, expert, and corporate agenda. We document a gradual shift from a focus on individual skills, their measurement and development, to an approach that considers the complexity of human capital and emphasizes holistic individual activity and the proactive role of the individual in his/her human development and in transforming the corporate environment.The authors show that the formation of this novel approach can be associated with new trends in socio-economic development, including the growing share of non-routine jobs, the transformation of work formats and broader processes of de-structuration, which require a proactive role of the individual in the maintenance and development of social structures, including business organizations. The study has shown that the formation of this new approach occurs gradually and simultaneously at the global level on the academic, expert, and corporate agendas, but with varying degrees of intensity and with different focuses. At the same time, it is the corporate agenda that can be regarded as a frontier. This study is based on a content analysis of academic publications, expert reports of international organizations and think tanks, as well as public reports and documents of the world’s leading innovative companies. The research employs the Big Data intelligence system iFORA.