In modern conditions of reforming the economy, the issue of effective investment in human capital becomes highly relevant. Therefore, despite the complexity of evaluating the effectiveness of such investments, it is difficult to overestimate the benefits of such costs, since they provide an opportunity to prepare highly qualified personnel capable of exercising high-quality production management, to introduce innovative technologies into technological chains, and therefore ensure the competitiveness of domestic products. So that the performance does not raise doubts, and the costs turn into high profits, new approaches are needed that correspond to modern realities. Economic science, by analogy with the natural science knowledge, is currently following the path of integrating various theories, which serves as a new impetus for its development and complication. Investment processes are part of an open, self-developing and self-organizing economic system, characterized by elements of disequilibrium, instability, irreversibility with many non-linear positive and negative feedbacks. What is successfully studied by such science as synergy. At the same time, universal interdisciplinary approaches do not fully offer a solution to complex economic problems, since many factors are imposed that form the specific conditions for their functioning. In this regard, consideration of institutional manifestations is mandatory. We propose to apply a synergetic-institutional approach, which allows to model the processes of investment in human capital and to predict the results of its further use in the modernization of production and/ or restructuring of the real sector of the economy, taking into account possible institutional constraints. (c) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK