The value of market systems development approaches have in recent years been applied in a more diverse range of fields beyond their origins in agriculture and finance. Increasingly, areas which had been the preserve of more direct forms of intervention with a strong emphasis on supporting often ailing public providers, are recognising the failure of these approaches in providing access to goods and services for the poor in a sustainable way. Areas such as health care, education, water, hygiene and sanitation, governance and land have all seen experimental programmes which have conceived of developmental challenges as being couched in complex adaptive and pluralistic systems, requiring of more facilitative approaches to stimulate large scale sustainable change. In this session at the BEAM Conference 2016, Ben Taylor ‒ guest editor of the Enterprise Development and Microfinance journal ‒ leads an examination of novel applications of market systems approaches, as covered in the publication.