Business Systems Laboratory - 2nd International Symposium “SYSTEMS THINKING FOR A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY. Advancements in Economic and Managerial Theory and Practice” January 23-24, 2014 Universitas Mercatorum Via Appia Pignatelli 62, 00178 Roma, Italy This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3 1 Policy Modeling as a new area for research: perspectives for a Systems Thinking and System Dynamics approach? Author 1 (Stefano, Armenia) Research Fellow, DIAG Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. email: armenia@dis.uniroma1.it Corresponding author President of SYDIC, the Italian Chapter of the System Dynamics Society www.systemdynamics.it Author 2 (Camillo, Carlini) Research Fellow, DIAG Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. email: carlini@dis.uniroma1.it Author 3 (Riccardo, Onori) DIAG Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. email: onori@dis.uniroma1.it Author 4 (Alessandro Pietro, Saullo) DIAG Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. email: saullo@dis.uniroma1.it ABSTRACT A new "strange" research area is emerging, whose name is Policy Modeling, which is an interdisciplinary “umbrella term” for a number of research fields, applications and technologies that can be applied in order to achieve the common goal of improving public decisionmaking in the age of complexity. It aims at making the policymaking cycle more effective and more intelligent, and at accelerating the learning path embedded in the policy cycle. However, as this area for research is relatively young, data is actually missing so a new interdisciplinary approach is also needed in order to shape this field. In fact, it has been shown that classical policy modeling still relies on classical impact assessment methodologies which have proved ineffective as to their inability to grasp the inherent nonlinear, dynamic and complex nature of the problems affecting public governance, as well as to the difficulty to share the modeling