Diffusion of Innovation in Large Scale Graphs

Will a new smartphone application diffuse deeply in the population or will it sink into oblivion soon? To predict this, we argue that common models of spread of innovations based on cascade dynamics or epidemics may not be fully adequate. In this paper, we model the spread of a new technological item in a population through a novel network dynamics where diffusion is based on the word-of-mouth and the persuasion strength increases the more the product is diffused. In this paper we carry on an analysis on large scale graphs to show off how the parameters of the model, the topology of the graph and, possibly, the initial diffusion of the item, determine whether the spread of the item is successful or not. The paper is completed by a number of numerical simulations corroborating the analytical results.