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, HRD needs to become more predictive - to develop the ability to understand how human capital systems and organizations will behave in future. Further development of systems models is required to allow such predictions to be made. Critical to the development of such models will be to understand that linear epistemology cannot be the dominant epistemology of practice and that dynamic complexity of challenges confronted by HRD professionals in their daily research and practice requires a nonlinear epistemology of practice, rather than reductive or linear thinking or processes of normal science. Although the adoption of a systems approach to research in HRD is not novel, methodologies and conceptual approaches underlying it use are not very well developed. In this paper, a stakeholder analysis methodology that was developed as a novel method in conducting systems approach research in human resource development, public policy and agricultural education is described.

Models on innovation, for the most part, do not include a comprehensive and end-to-end view. Most innovation policy attention seems to be focused on the capacity to innovate and on input factors such as R&D investment, scientific institutions, human resources and capital. Such inputs frequently serve as proxies for innovativeness and are correlated with intermediate outputs such as patent counts and outcomes such as GDP per capita. While this kind of analysis is generally indicative of innovative behaviour, it is less useful in terms of discriminating causality and what drives successful strategy or public policy interventions. This situation has led to the developing of new frameworks for the innovation system led by National Science and Technology Policy Centres across the globe. These new models of innovation are variously referred to as the National Innovation Ecosystem. There is, however, a fundamental question that needs to be answered: what elements should an innovation policy include, and how should such policies be implemented? This paper attempts to answer this question.