are primarily but not exclusively with immediate neighbours and the nature of the influence is modulated Any interaction can feed back onto itself directly or after a number of intervening stages. Such feedback can vary in quality. This is known as recurrency The overall behavior of the system of elements is not predicted by the behavior of the individual elements Such systems may be open and it may be difficult or impossible to define system boundaries Complex systems operate under far from equilibrium conditions. There has to be a constant flow of energy to maintain the organization of the system Complex systems have a history. They evolve and their past is co-responsible for their present behaviour Elements in the system may be ignorant of the behaviour of the system as a whole, responding only to the information or physical stimuli available to them locally Robert Axelrod & Michael D. Cohen identify a series of key terms from a modeling perspective: Strategy, a conditional action pattern that indicates what to do in which circumstances Artifact, a material resource that has definite location and can respond to the action of agents Agent, a collection of properties, strategies & capabilities for interacting with artifacts & other agents Population, a collection of agents, or, in some situations, collections of strategies System, a larger collection, including one or more populations of agents and possibly also artifacts Type, all the agents (or strategies) in a population that have some characteristic in common Variety, the diversity of types within a population or system Interaction pattern, the recurring regularities of contact among types within a system Space (physical), location in geographical space & time of agents and artifacts Space (conceptual), "location" in a set of categories structured so that "nearby" agents will tend to interact Selection, processes that lead to an increase or decrease in the frequency of various types of agent or strategies Success criteria or performance measures, a "score" used by an agent or designer in attributing credit in the selection of relatively successful (or unsuccessful) strategies or agents Turner and Baker synthesized the characteristics of complex adaptive systems from the literature and tested these characteristics in the context of creativity and innovation. Each of these eight characteristics had been shown to be present in the creativity and innovative processes: Path dependent: Systems tend to be sensitive to their initial conditions. The same force might affect