The essays and lectures collected in this book center around knowledge transfer from the complex-system sciences to applications in business, industry and society, as viewed from a broad perspective. The contributions aim to raise awareness across the spectrum to meet the increasing need to integrate lessons from complexity research into everyday planning, decision making, logistics or optimization procedures and forecasting. The writing has been largely kept non-technical.

The essays and lectures collected in this book center around knowledge transfer from the complex-system sciences to applications in business, industry and society, as viewed from a broad perspective. The contributions aim to raise awareness across the spectrum to meet the increasing need to integrate lessons from complexity research into everyday planning, decision making, logistics or optimization procedures and forecasting. The writing has been largely kept non-technical.

What are the principles that keep our society together? This question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing question, what are the forces that keep our world together. However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization, require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of social interactions,...