Sustainable human capital: product innovation and employee partnerships in technology firms

Abstract

PurposeTo date, sustainability in technology firms has focused on improving outputs while maintaining the same inputs. The purpose of this paper is to propose a six‐stage model for enhancing inputs as well as outputs, named sustainable human capital. The paper extends traditional views of individuals as human capital, measured as formal education and direct experience to incorporate more holistic and humanistic views of informal education and indirectly related experience. This allows technology firms, whose lifeblood is innovation, to increase employee satisfaction and performance, quality and quantity of technology firm innovation, and societal well‐being in the form of sustainable products and services.Design/methodology/approachThis paper extends concepts in innovation management to build a holistic model of employees as sustainable human capital. By bridging theory and practice, this paper provides a framework for knowledge‐building partnerships and, thus, relational wealth, or the value created by and for a firm through its internal relations among and with employees.FindingsA model of sustainable human capital starts with pre‐hiring processes (raw materials), on‐boarding (design stage), training and development (production stage), developing external partnerships and integrating individual employees with the ecosystem (distribution stage), building internal relationships through mentoring (use and maintenance stage), and employee's exit through succession planning (recovery stage).Originality/valueTechnology managers have been utilizing a lifecycle approach for product innovation, yet have de‐coupled the product from the people, the fundamental source of innovation. Thus, re‐incorporating the human aspect to the lifecycle approach offers practices for holistic engagement of employees in innovation. Just as management literature pushed economists to shift their views of employees from homogeneous units of human capital to heterogeneous individuals, sustainability literature must evolve in its approach to start thinking of employees as discrete individuals with differentiated skills that change over time.