Sustainability Complex Network

We introduce the concept of quantitative evaluation of a complex network made up of researchers operating in different disciplines and different sectors belonging to life and hard sciences or social science and humanities or industrial and entrepreneurial activities, which, in addition to their disciplinary research, interact within each other in interdisciplinary scientific collaborations on sustainability projects. The complex network that we consider in this paper is of the small-world type, which has been already used in the study of several other biological, technological and social complex systems. This kind of network has a flexible structure which is in between those of the completely regular and the completely random networks. Similarly, the increase of interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars having a large and recognized experience in a given disciplinary sector may be favoured by random links arising in facing up specific issues of sustainability. Numerical results are given for a few unweighted networks having up to ten research groups with up to hundred researchers each.