Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006

Objectives and Concept

As promising as the recent discoveries regarding the functioning, adaptiveness and robustness of complex physical, biological, and socio-economic systems may be their potential has not yet been broadly recognized in business, industry, public organizations, administrations, and governments. This is mostly because these findings have not yet entered curricula of standard study directions and due to the scarcity of real-world applications, at least published ones.

This workshop aims at increasing the awareness for the relevance of complexity science for:

the optimal organization of social networks and adaptive institutions,

the relevance of information flows for social cooperation,

the prediction and control of systems with non-linear interactions, delays, and imperfect information,

counter-intuitive effects of management strategies,

the interaction of boundedly rational agents,

disaster, crisis and risk management,

transport networks and urban evolution,

the stability of supply systems etc.

The first and the second day of the workshop are reserved for the invited speakers, which can probably afford to stay a maximum of two days. The third day is for contributed talks of 20-30 minutes plus 10 minutes of discussion. The first day will start with a short introduction of every invited speaker, including the fields represented by them. This is to maximize interactions between and with the invited speakers from the very beginning. For similar reasons, parallel sessions will be avoided, while a poster session serves to cover the width of the field. The invited speakers will identify the three most interesting poster contributions. These will be presented on the second day for 15 minutes each, and the best one will be awarded with the Prize for Applied Research in Complexity Science.

Each invited talk will consist of a 40 minute presentation an a 10 minute discussion. This allows for about 12 invited presentations on the first and second day and about the same number of contributed talks on the third day. Sufficient breaks and a workshop dinner on the first day serve for personal discussions and established complexity scientists, and between business and academic people, between young and established complexity scientists, and bewtween business representatives and PhD students. For maximum cross fertilization, the number of participants is limited to about 60 people.