Leadership and diffusion of information for policy implementation: a new methodological approach

The aim of this research is to explore more effective strategies to build leadership groups for the implementation of policies whose success depends on the massive mobilisation of targets. The underlying motivation for this work stems from the observation of a weak participation by traders in modernising a city’s centre commerce in spite of high financial incentives. The analysis of the leadership – the board in charge of the trade associationwhose main task was to lead this initiative, showed a poor performance in diffusing information. Using combinatorial optimisation techniques, two new leadership groups are built. The three leadership groups’ performance in the diffusion of information is evaluated and compared. This reveals that, with the tools of social network analysis and combinatorial optimisation, the choice of leaders for policy processes can be improved.