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

The study aims to empirically reveal and conceptually interpret the manifestations of a gradually emerging approach to the issues of human capital content, measurement and development in 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 the holistic individual activity and the agentic role of the individual in his/her human capital/potential 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, requiring 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 in the academic, expert, and corporate agenda, but with varying degrees of intensity and with different accents. At the same time, it is the corporate agenda that can be regarded as a frontier. The 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.