Juan Carlos Barahona, Alex Pentland

Abstract

Finding the influential people in a community is key to diffusion process of technological innovations, as well as other kinds of products. The ability to recognize who are the influential members of a community is important for diffusion policy makers and managers. This information is traditionally obtained through costly ethnographic studies which are not necessarily efficient. In certain endeavors the use of socioeconomic and demographic measures characteristic of those ethnographic studies is not effective, because the target population is very homogeneous. In the specific case of diffusion of advanced digital technologies in underserved communities or rural areas the challenge of economic sustainability becomes an issue and the cost of traditional methods to find who are the influential members becomes prohibitive