Introducing innovation in social networks: A cost-benefit analysis of entry point selection

Social networks have been growing and evolving from mere means of communication into the biggest potential global market and access platform to hundreds of millions of customers ever built. However, although companies and organisations can have access to millions of potential customers almost in an instant, being able to identify the best initial entry points for introducing innovation (be it a service or product) is key to aiding its acceptance and enhancing its prospects of further diffusion into the market. In this paper, by using the economic model of return to scale, we investigate a mechanism for identifying these potential best initial entry points for introducing innovation in social networks in terms of its efficiency and a cost-benefits analysis. We present a set of experiments based on two real social network datasets and also a synthetic one that shows the effects of deploying our mechanism.