System, crowd, and communal innovation: can the monks solve the elephant?

A systems approach reveals emergent group behavior of an assembly of interacting elements, networks, and subgroups, using modeling and simulation analyses that are capable of handling massive data and complex structures. As system complexity and data sizes increase, efficient collaboration becomes crucial to construct, refine, and analyze the model in a timely manner. A solution may be "crowd sourcing," which provides a platform for communal innovation.