Special Session(s)

Many complex engineered systems operate in environments where classical market competition plays only a limited role, while regulation, public policy, societal expectations, and institutional constraints fundamentally shape strategic outcomes. This is particularly visible in sectors such as energy systems, electricity transmission, telecommunications, transportation infrastructure, water utilities, healthcare, and other safety- or reliability-critical systems. Similar dynamics, however, are increasingly observed in a wide range of industries influenced by platform dominance, public accountability, or strong policy intervention.

In such contexts, organizations often act as system operators, system integrators, or coordinators of systems-of-systems rather than competitors in a traditional market sense. Their strategic challenges arise less from rivalry and more from the interaction between market forces and non-market forces, including regulators, policymakers, courts, public opinion, activist groups, and various actors seeking to influence the allocation of economic or social value within the system.

The electricity and energy sectors provide a particularly transparent illustration of these dynamics, as system operators must continuously balance technical constraints, long-term investment decisions, regulatory oversight, political objectives, and societal expectations. However, the strategic tensions observed in these sectors are not unique and can be found across many complex socio-technical systems.

This special session aims to create a forum for discussing how organizations strategically manage complex systems exposed to strong non-market influences, and how market-based mechanisms interact with regulatory, political, and societal forces to shape system evolution, resilience, and long-term sustainability.

The session aligns closely with the IEEE ISSE focus on systems-of-systems, enterprise systems engineering, societal and political impacts of systems, decision analysis, resilience, and management systems, while explicitly encouraging dialogue between systems engineering and strategic management perspectives.

Organizers: Dubravko Sabolić, Croatian Transmission System Operator, Ltd., and the University of Zagreb and Murat Akpinar, JAMK University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä, Finland