Interest networks : understanding the influence of interesting people in an organization

Abstract

This thesis applies network theory to firms, their employees, and various aspects of the employees to understand diversity within an industry at both the firm-level and employee-level. We hypothesize that the interest diversity of a firms' employee can influence that firm's economic performance and growth. Using the LinkedIn API, we are able to collect ~600 employees (past and present) for 43 companies using a keyword search. This data is used to create a visualization of people's interests, an "Interest Space", which is a network graph of how interests are categorized and linked to each other. By analyzing the data from firms associated with the Media Lab, we begin to understand how individual interests affect success among a small network of companies. We research this through case studies of a few companies by analyzing their financial data and interests of their employees.