Strategic flexibility analysis of agrifood nanotechnology skill needs identification

- Strategic Flexibility Analysis (SFA) enhances the understanding of skill needs in agrifood nanotechnology system.
- SFA can be used to forecast future skill needs of emerging technologies.
- Interdisciplinarity is more than knowledge exchange between different well-defined disciplines.
- Framing interdisciplinary skills in nanotechnology as sociopolitical boundary-making process may clarify training issues.
- SFA can be used as a standalone forecasting methodology, but better to go beyond using it as a single method.

The world is experiencing significant, largely economic and sociotechnical, induced change. These induced changes are meaningful with a function of people taking collective actions around common beliefs. These changes are more than jargon, cliché, and hyperbole, and they are effecting major transformations. These transformations will impact on how human resources are developed, and we need to be able to forecast its effects. In order to produce such forecasts, Human Resource Development needs to become more predictive - to develop the ability to understand how human capital systems and organizations will behave in future. As part of a multi-phase, mixed methods study design based on systems and complexity theories to identify skill needs for the emerging agrifood nanotechnology sector, a strategic flexibility analysis (SFA) was conducted. Strategic Flexibility Framework (SFF) is a scenario analysis tool and its use in this study is based on the idea that Business Leaders, Managers, Educators and Human Resource Development professionals require flexibility to adjust decisions within given constraints. This paper describes the use of strategic flexibility analysis and the qualitative systems approaches as tools for systems research and it implications for human resources development and management.