The Impact Of Innovators’ Behaviour: a study on attractiveness and coordination

Innovation is defined as the introduction of new things or methods. In the history of human society, progress and cultural evolution occurred as a consequence of innovation processes. Typically changes proposed by a restricted number of peoples became widely adopted innovations as soon as a broad consensus formed around their adoption. In this thesis, we explore the role of innovators as potentially influential individuals in our society. Studying their behaviour is crucial to understand what are the factors that drove their decision in the process of becoming influential. In particular, here we uncover the importance of cultural attractors as cities where strong akin communities are present. Our approach involves the use of Wikipedia as a source for historical mobility data to model the migration patterns of globally relevant innovators. While here we study mobility on a broad range of different disciplines where different innovators gave their contributions, we also focus on a smaller and more modern system. Historical innovators are easily identified and discerned from uninfluential ones thanks to the wisdom of the time. However, due to the scarce availability of individual historical data, we point our attention to more recent versions of innovators: code developer. The flourishment of the digital era made code developers at the very centre of our global economy. We study this coupled system as a representative example of the interaction between innovators and the economy. Indeed, a significant, non-trivial interaction is found among the two worlds. More in general, in this thesis we highlight the relevance of innovators in shaping human collective responses. Our results reveal that innovators play a major role both individually and collectively at different scales. We provide measures of these effects (i) by looking at how innovator communities construct the attractiveness of a city and (ii) by studying how individual contributions in the innovation domain can dramatically affect financial behaviour also at short time scales. Our result expands the evidence of the need for a new research dimension, where human behaviour is studied as a complex system moving over an intricate network of intertwined interactions.