■ Guest Editorial Governing Business Systems. Theories and Challenges for Systems Thinking in Practice Gandolfo Dominici 1,2 * 1 Business Systems Laboratory, Italy 2 University of Palermo, Italy INTRODUCING THE BUSINESS SYSTEMS LABORATORY FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM The Business Systems Laboratory Symposia are a set of conferences aiming to address the global economic and social challenges of our times by systemic perspective and shedding the light to the several interactions between natural social and economic systems. This multidisciplinary perspective includes management, psychology, economics, engineering and sociology. The Fourth Business Systems Laboratory International Symposium (http://www.bslab- symposium.net/) on ‘Governing Business Systems. Theories and Challenges for Systems Thinking in Practice’ was held in Vilnius (Lithuania) on 24–26 August 2016. It focused on the epistemological, theoretical, methodological, technical and practical advancements in the theory and practice for governing business systems, which can be useful to address the present and future challenges in the global business scenarios. Participants from more than 25 countries attended this conference, and 56 presented their research in seven tracks covering a wide range of topics in the business systems domain: Social and Organisational Systemic Theories (chair: Raul Espejo); Systems thinking applications for markets and firms (chairs: Maurice Yolles and Mike C. Jackson); System Dynamics (chair: Stefano Armenia); ICT and Knowledge Management (chairs: Francesco Caputo and Leonard Walletzký); Financial Systems (chair: Maurice Yolles); Sustainability, Business ethic and CSR (chair: Mauro Sciarelli); Interactions Revolution (chair: Gandolfo Dominici) and the poster session. THE RELEVANCE OF SYSTEMIC APPROACHES FOR GOVERNING BUSINESS SYSTEMS The complexity of our times is due to social, economic and organizational factors that imply relentless changes in the logics and the methods to steer business systems. Nowadays, the global business arena is more dynamic and inter- connected than in the last century. This implies the need for new methodologies to govern business systems that need to be nonlinear and resilient in order to manage the emergence of unpredictable phenomena (Dominici, 2012a and 2012b). Likewise, firms and organizations cannot be only regarded as isolated systems * Correspondence to: Gandolfo Dominici, Business Systems Laboratory Italy. E-mail: gandolfo.dominici@libero.it Editorial note to the special section for the 4th Business Systems Laboratory Symposium – Vilnius 2016 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res 34, 310–312 (2017) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sres.2454