On incentivizing innovation diffusion in a network of coordinating agents

Innovation diffusion is fundamental for societal growth and development, and understanding how to unlock it is key toward devising policies encouraging the adoption of new practices, e.g., sustainable innovations. Here, we propose a mathematical model to investigate such a problem. Specifically, we consider a coordination game —which is a standard game-theoretic model used to study innovation diffusion—and we embed it on an activity-driven network. Within this model, we integrate three policies to incentivize the adoption of the innovation: i) providing a direct advantage for adopting it, ii) making people sensitive to emerging trends at the population level, and iii) increasing the visibility of adopters of the innovation, respectively. We provide analytical insights to shed light on the effect of the joint use of these three policies on unlocking innovation diffusion, supported by numerical simulations.