In an era marked by unprecedented challenges – from climate change to digital transformation – the need for innovative and effective solutions has never been more urgent. Recent events, such as the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have vividly demonstrated the complexity of modern organizations and the environments they navigate. This workshop seeks groundbreaking research that addresses these complexities, offering new models, methods, and tools for a rapidly evolving world.
Complexity represents nowadays a mandatory approach to properly address research questions in economic, financial, managerial, organizational and innovation systems. In fact, these systems are Complex Adaptive Systems characterized by non-linear relations among their constitutive elements, heterogeneity, self-reflexivity, emergent properties, self-organization, expectations, and dynamic continuous adaptation.
Complexity theory and complex adaptive systems let to gain an appropriate perspective and the use of proper methodological tools to analyze economic, innovation, management, and organizational issues.
In particular, a complexity approach, i.e. a dynamic and systemic approach, allows modeling complex system behaviors, reproducing the internal dynamics of the whole system from the bottom, focusing on its microelements such as the agents, their attributes, actions, goals, coordination mechanism and the network structure (and type of relationships) that connects them.
Moreover, by exploiting the complexity approach it is possible to consider the ecosystem in which organizations evolve. Thus, all the value and supply chains can be investigated, and all the coordination mechanisms among the different actors can be studied.
In addition, the diffusion of new technologies for massive data collection offers the opportunity to measure and evaluate complex system dynamics through data-driven methodologies. New tools can be used to collect large amounts of rich, high-quality, and reliable data, in almost real-time. They provide automatic and more objective measurements of individual, team, and firm behaviors, supporting scholars in analyzing complex systems.
This workshop will focus on recent advances in theory and models regarding how organizations (firms, networks, industries) deal with the current competitive challenges by using a complexity theory approach. Ranging from single firms to networks of industries, the workshop will explore their innovation dynamics and sustainable structures and processes by using the agent-based simulation and will provide managerial insights useful to surf their increasing complexity.