Northwestern’s Kellogg school is establishing a new $25 million institute for studying complexity science. Here’s what you need to know Northwestern’s Kellogg school is establishing a new $25 million institute for studying complexity science. Here’s what you need to know

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is hoping to find solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges with the help of a multi-million dollar investment.

The top business school—home to the No. 5 MBA program, according to Fortune’s 2023 rankings—is launching a new institute dedicated to complexity science with the goal of better understanding issues facing societies, markets and businesses. 

Named the Ryan Institute on Complexity after a $25 million gift by the Ryan family, the center will be led by school leaders in physics, economics, and sociology as it seeks to harness the growth of big data and artificial intelligence in relation to business.

Ben Jones, professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, is one of the new institute’s co-leaders. He says complexity is about understanding that it is the relationships between things that really matter.

“One of the main things we do in business school is convey to our students in every program the latest cutting edge insights about how to understand why an organization may succeed or fail, where would it be a good market to invest, how better to make decisions,” Jones tells Fortune. “And what complexity science does is it’s thinking about bringing together different disciplinary perspectives.” 

In 2021, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to researchers for their groundbreaking contributions in complexity science—specifically in developing climate models, one of the most notable examples of Earth’s complex systems.

The Ryan Institute is set to integrate learning across disciplines not just in the business school, but also across Northwestern’s campus. To start, the Ryan Institute will focus on three main areas: the power of social networks, the secrets of invention, and human-machine partnerships.

While a lesser known field of study—especially in the business world—complexity science has been researched for decades.

Dashun Wang, professor of management and organizations at Northwestern’s management and engineering schools and co-leader of the new institute, says in a way, business leaders have been applying complexity science for a while.

“Some of the greatest business ideas, over the past, say 20 years, are about creating new connections in the industry that previously did not have that connection,” Wang tells Fortune. “So if you think about Uber—by connecting passengers and drivers; Airbnb is the same.”

He says there are many opportunities for complexity science to be applied in the business setting moving forward.

And one of the best parts about complexity science—it can be applied across sectors, from healthcare and climate science to stock markets and manufacturing. 

One of the key parts of the new institute will be a dry lab setting, which will allow students and faculty to especially leverage large language models and capitalize on the institute’s focus on human-machine partnerships.

“We fundamentally believe that you know, machines are not coming to take your job, it’s the people who will know how to use these machines will take your job,” says Wang.

Deloitte even recently floated the idea for companies to create chief human machine resource officers to help study and define workflows between employees and computers.

Applying complexity science perspective to large scale data analysis will allow the Kellogg school to challenge traditional thinking and create new business applications, Wang adds.

The $25 million investment by the Ryan Family Foundation adds to a $480 million gift in 2021—the largest in school history—for biomedical, economic, and business research as well as to redevelop Northwestern’s football field.

“We are thrilled to support the establishment of this revolutionary research institute that will place Kellogg and Northwestern University at the forefront of the study of complexity science,” said Pat Ryan, Jr of the Ryan Family Foundation, in a press release. “Cutting edge analytical approaches can now unlock previously unimaginable understandings of our complex world that will be transformational for business and society.”