# The Beneficial Role of Mobility for the Emergence of Innovation

## TL;DR

This paper models the dynamics of innovation in populations, demonstrating that increased mobility among agents promotes the emergence and sustainability of innovation through group heterogeneity and policy incentives.

## Contribution

It introduces a simple evolutionary model highlighting how mobility enhances innovation emergence by affecting group composition and payoff structures.

## Key findings

- Mobility positively influences the emergence of innovation.
- Heterogeneous groups with more innovators yield higher payoffs.
- System policies can further promote innovation through reward factors.

## Abstract

Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some individuals are talented at proposing innovation (say innovators), while others at deeply exploring proposed novelties, at getting further insights on a theory, or at developing products, services, and so on (say developers). This separation in terms of innovators and developers raises an issue of paramount importance: under which conditions a system is able to maintain innovators? According to a simple model, this work investigates the evolutionary dynamics that characterize the emergence of innovation. In particular, we consider a population of innovators and developers, in which agents form small groups whose composition is crucial for their payoff. The latter depends on the heterogeneity of the formed groups, on the amount of innovators they include, and on an award-factor that represents the policy of the system for promoting innovation. Under the hypothesis that a "mobility" effect may support the emergence of innovation, we compare the equilibria reached by our population in different cases. Results confirm the beneficial role of "mobility", and the emergence of further interesting phenomena.