Abstract for: Why business and socio-economic models often do not live up to expectations

Looking back critically at about 30 business and socio-economic dynamic simulation models developed over the last 40 years I notice that many of them did not quite live up to what was expected of them. Very often this was caused by organizational shortcomings during the implementation process. Other reasons were discrepancies between thinking and reality ("known known"), insufficient treatment of uncertainties ("known unknown") and/or the occurrence of events neither expected nor anticipated ("unknown unknown"). Based on the analysis of these shortcomings and on references in relevant publications, this paper presents some suggestions on how to avoid them.