At present, the trend towards interdisciplinary research is actively developing in science, vivid proof of which is the penetration into various scientific areas of synergetics - a science that studies the processes that occur in complex, nonequilibrium systems.
As it turned out, the most diverse systems (natural, space, biological, physical, technical, social, etc.) have common patterns in the development of processes as parts of systems called subsystems and of the systems themselves and common fundamental laws. The synergistic effect can manifest itself in a wide variety of ways, but, despite this, there is much in common in the manifestations of this effect in many systems and, therefore, the study of very different systems can be carried out by similar methods in various sciences. So, the results that have been achieved in physics and mathematics can be tried to apply in other sciences, in particular, in economics, and you can see in theory and practice how the synergistic manifest itself effect in the economy.
Interestingly, an implicit desire for interdisciplinarity has been characteristic of economics since the time of Adam Smith. However, the consideration of all the phenomena of reality only in the linear determinism that underlies the mechanistic paradigm is recognized by mathematicians and physicists as a very limited approach, a special case of the manifestation of more complex synergetic processes. Synergetics determined the boundaries of determinism, demonstrated the role of chance and began to study nonequilibrium states. Synergetics has enriched the scientists' ideas about the complexity of processes that occur in the world, inviting the scientific community to start discussing such problems as chaos and order, points and areas of bifurcations, the appearance and development of attractors (simple and "strange"), regimes with exacerbations, etc.
Synergistic the effect is the result of the combined action of system elements, which can lead to a qualitative (emergent) change in its state by choosing one of the possible developmental options under the influence of certain fluctuations.
Synergetic ideas quickly began to penetrate into the economy. A growing number of economists use such terms as “bifurcation”, “attractor”, “chaos” and others in their works. Some definitions in the synergistic paradigm have become so popular that sometimes their true meanings can be distorted quite strongly. One such example is the use of the concept of “synergistic effect,” although it would be more correct to speak in such cases of the effect of synergy. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding of the synergetic effect as exceeding the result of joint actions over a simple sum of individual actions of system elements (the “1 + 1 = 3” effect) is more widespread in the literature and on the Internet. Often economists in their publications consider synergistic the effect only as the sum of the growth of economic indicators of the enterprise as a result of, for example, the merger of two or more companies. This is, to put it mildly, not entirely true, and to be more precise, it is completely wrong.
In our opinion, the synergistic effect in the economy is manifested as the result of the integrative interaction of the elements of the economic system, which can lead to a change in the quality state, the ways of its development, and to the dynamic equilibrium of the economy with a stable development path.
Synergistic effect in economic processes, as it is described in the monograph by A.A. Myasnikov's “Synergetic Effects in the Modern Economy: An Introduction to the Problem”, is pretty close to the author’s ideas.