The Digital Economy and Customer Complexity

We consider the impact of the internet and communication in creating explosive product and service markets and how this will change the balance of power between the vendors and their customer subgroups. Indeed, the customers may network, self-organise, develop the submarkets, and innovate more rapidly than the suppliers. Who owns the marketplace then?
In turn this presents a problem of dealing with a complex (networked) system: the interacting customer base. Monitoring, modelling, forecasting and decision making must rely on mathematical ideas from complexity science so as to be scalable. In this paper we will discuss recent advances in this field made in the UK facing the digital economy challenges, and the role of Complexity Sciences, citing examples from the service sector.