The Epidemic of Innovation – Playing Around with an Agent-Based Model

The artificial units of an agent-based model can play around to diffuse innovation and new ideas or act to conserve the status quo, escaping from advances in technology or organizational methods or new ideas and proposals, exactly as the agents in an epidemic situation can act to diffuse or to avoid the contagion. The emerging structure is obviously a function of the density of the agents, but its behavior can vary in a dramatic way if a few agents are able to evolve some form of intelligent behavior. In our case intelligent behavior is developed allowing the agents to plan actions using artificial neural networks or, as an alternative, reinforcement learning techniques.