Strategic Management of Complex and Regulated Systems: Interplay of Market and Non-Market Forces
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
Cybernetic Governance and Viable Systems: Engineering Resilience in Complex Systems-of-Systems
Traditional systems engineering often focuses on the ‘how’ of technical integration. In contrast, systems thinking and cybernetics provide the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of long-term survival and adaptation. This track invites papers applying these theoretical frameworks to the engineering of modern, large-scale systems. It specifically seeks contributions on how to design and implement collective intelligence mechanisms that allow complex, large-scale systems to self-organize, learn, and maintain viability in unpredictable environments.
Key topics of interest:
Theoretical Foundations of Viability: Exploring how systems thinking and cybernetic feedback loops can strengthen the theoretical foundations of Systems Engineering and improve the benefits of systems thinking and collective intelligence mechanisms in industrial applications.
Governing systems of systems (SoS): Applying cybernetic control models to manage the autonomy and coordination required in the ‘system of systems’ environment.
Engineering for resilience and survival: Using the principles of systems thinking to design cybersystemic organizations that can maintain core functions amidst environmental shifts and disruptions.
Viable Management Systems: Integrating systems thinking into management systems and program/project management to improve organisational agility and decision-making.
Socio-technical cybernetics: Analysing the societal and political impacts of systems and human systems integration through the lens of holistic systems theory to ensure ethical and sustainable system design.
Governance of Distributed Autonomy: Building cybersystemic structures that balance individual component autonomy with the collective goals of the total system.
Organizers: Francesco Caputo, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy; Igor Perko, University of Maribor, Slovenia; and Alfonso Reyes Alvarado, University of the Andes, Colombia.
Funding Opportunities in Europe: European Research Council (ERC)
Research funding is essential to enable researchers to pursue ground-breaking ideas and original research. It is also very important in research collaborations. In this session, one of the main EU research funding programmes will be presented: The European Research Council (ERC) is a leading European funding body supporting excellent investigator-driven frontier research across all fields of science. ERC calls are open to researchers around the world. The ERC offers various outstanding funding opportunities with grants budgets of €1.5 to €3.5 million for individual scientists.
The session will provide an excellent opportunity for participants to find out the latest information about this EU funding programme. It will be particularly helpful to early-career and mid-career participants, especially graduate students, post-docs, researchers, and tenure-track faculty thinking about applying for funding to conduct research in Europe. All nationalities of applicants are welcome for projects carried out at a host institution in Europe (European Union member states and associated countries).
Presented by: Endika Bengoetxea, ERCEA