Innovation, the creation of new, technologically feasible, commercially realisable products and processes, is permanently emerging from an ongoing interaction process of innovative organisations such as universities, research institutes, firms, government agencies, venture capitalists and others. These actors generate and exchange knowledge, financial capital, and other resources in networks of relationships which are embedded in institutional frameworks on the local, regional, national and international level. While the contexts of innovation performance provide turbulent environments with high uncertainty and ambiguity, innovation networks in complex social systems typically show characteristics such as multi-scale interactions with high contingency and non-linearity, emergent behaviour, pattern formation, and self-organisation. IRU's research deals with governance issues of innovation networks in complex social systems. Most projects combine a conceptual framework of complexity science and social systems theory with computational methods such as network analysis, agent-based modelling (e.g. using the SKIN model) and social simulation.