The role of network characteristics of the innovation spreaders in agriculture

Abstract

The diffusion of innovations is largely influenced by the characteristics of the network of initial adopters (or innovation spreader). We investigate how these characteristics tend to influence the adoption rate and the speed of the diffusion process of a technological innovation in agriculture. The diffusion process is simulated through an Agent Based Model that replicates real-world data. We found that the closeness and the clusterization of the networks are the variables that tend to affect the most the capability of spreading innovations among members. Our findings have direct policy implications: since innovations help advancing the economic development of the agricultural sector, promoting the emergence of networks that have desirable characteristics would enhance growth. Our analysis provides specific insights on how to plan networks with desirable characteristics for the innovation spreaders.

The Future of the EU Bioenergy Sector: Economic, Environmental, Social, and Legislative Challenges

“…The literature on social aspect of the bioenergy sectors have emphasized that the economic opportunities, in terms of greater competitiveness, economic growth, and regional development (Busu, 2019;D'Adamo et al, 2020a;Ronzon et al, 2020;Omri and Belaïd, 2021), may be coupled with the emergence of new income opportunities (additional local revenue streams) and the creation of additional new jobs (Cambero and Sowlati, 2016;Domac et al, 2005;Lehtonen and Okkonen, 2016;Zahraee et al, 2020). Moreover, a broad range of other interlinked socio-economic topics have gained attention, i.e., the rehabilitation of degraded or marginal lands (Panoutsou and Chiaramonti, 2020), the provision of training and skills development (Diaz-Chavez et al, 2015), the synergic and pro-innovation role of networks of stakeholders (Lopolito et al, 2022;Pitkänen et al, 2016;Sanz-Hernández et al, 2019), and the positive spillovers generated by the end of life cycle (D'Adamo et al, 2020b).…”