The Leadership Letters is a business and social-science Journal dedicated to advancing multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary understanding of leadership.
Editor Robert M. Yawson
Management and Human Resource Development of Nanotechnology Workforce: Dialogue at The Interface (2025)
Robert Yawson
Nanotechnology presents an unprecedented potential for the wellbeing of society through technological advances and innovation. This is a fact acknowledged by almost every major governmental and intergovernmental organization. This potential is creating an unprecedented opportunity for scientific, ethical, legal, economic, political, public, and social dialogues in one bundle that better represent the pace and complexity of the modern human enterprise (Yawson, 2011). This “dialogue at the interface” as I prefer to call it, is not an easy path, but a challenge that needs to be overcome as a test of the innate part of our humanity - our enduring will not just to survive, but to thrive. While the initial claims of the promise and perils have lost some level of steam, the unprecedented, disruptive nature of nanotechnology is real. This study describes a proposed ‘architectural framework’ involving different methods and tools to develop an ‘ecological system of innovation’ for dialogue at the interface for nanotechnology which involves all the ‘voices’ to enhance efficient technology management, skill needs identification, and workforce and human resource development. These methods and tools include inter alia: Expert Elicitation (Van der Fels-Klerx, Goossens, Saatkamp, & Horst, 2002), Quadruple Helix (Yawson, 2009), Stakeholder Analysis (Parmar et al., 2010), Complex Adaptive Systems Modelling(Allen, 2014), Sociotechnical Systems Analysis (Wiek, Lang, & Siegrist, 2008), and Strategic Flexibility Analysis (Raynor, 2007).