The Contribute of Viable System Approach in Directing and Managing Inter-Firm Relationships

Today complex service systems represent an emerging model for business experiences and competition, strengthening inter-firms relationships for competitive advantage and long run survival. Studying several foundations of new dominant logics in international literature, it will be interesting to deepen inter-firm relationships in networked context following a theoretical comparison of system framework foundations, analyzing main significant features of Viable System Approach (VSA). System thinking comes from the shift in attention from the part to the whole, implying a perception of reality as an integrated and interacting unicuum of phenomena, where the individual properties of the single parts become indistinct, while the relationships between the parts themselves and the events they produce through their interaction, become more important, seeing that “system elements are rationally connected”. The work then leads to identify the specific contributes of VSA to inter-firms system relationships directing and managing; this paper aims to enforce interpretations about Business Systems and their interactions inside networked context and environmental relationships. They will be highlighted emerging interpretations of inter-firm co-operations following nowadays foundations of System Thinking, Network Theories and Service Logics, considering new related reflections about service value networks and service systems and verifying possible useful contributes deriving from VSA.