Special Perspectives: Human Resources Management in the Innovation Economy: Self-Managed Living Systems

By Thierry Picq, Professor at E.M. LYON

To thrive, high-tech companies must excel at the management of human capital: human resources systems and practices. These systems, like their technology counterparts, have to be highly innovative and, at times, unorthodox to satisfy the demands of this unique business environment. It is evident that this population of autonomous, techno-literate, mobile, and entrepreneurial knowledge workers cannot be satisfied by classic human resource management (HRM) systems based on an industrial context for dominantly worker populations with little education who are looking for stability and security. Traditional approaches seem to be ill adapted to knowledge workers, who are in a position to set the HR agenda.