Today, our society is faced with complex challenges. Think, for example, of the problems we face in the transport, health-care sector or education sector. Required, disruptive innovations, often involving ICT, come to a grinding halt if the solutions are sought within one single domain. Actors from different sectors have to be involved to close the solution both in terms of contributing components (knowledge, skills, infra- and process building blocks) as well as in a financial sense.

We deal with a network. By looking at these exciting challenges through a cohesive network vision, a new huge set of perspectives, insights and modelling tools become available. Transferring (horizontally) attainments from one part to another part of the network or (vertically) from one aggregation level to another, comes within reach by discovering a plethora of isomorphic and congruent relations, respectively.

We learn to master the performance of the network as a whole and not to look at the individual nodes or links: a trans-sector or more generally a trans-nodal approach instead of a partial rational intra-sectoral or intra-nodal approach, respectively.