@article {1018, title = {Forecasting success via early adoptions analysis: A data-driven study}, journal = {PloS one}, volume = {12}, number = {12}, year = {2017}, pages = {e0189096}, abstract = {Innovations are continuously launched over markets, such as new products over the retail market or new artists over the music scene. Some innovations become a success; others don{\textquoteright}t. Forecasting which innovations will succeed at the beginning of their lifecycle is hard. In this paper, we provide a data-driven, large-scale account of the existence of a special niche among early adopters, individuals that consistently tend to adopt successful innovations before they reach success: we will call them Hit-Savvy. Hit-Savvy can be discovered in very different markets and retain over time their ability to anticipate the success of innovations. As our second contribution, we devise a predictive analytical process, exploiting Hit-Savvy as signals, which achieves high accuracy in the early-stage prediction of successful innovations, far beyond the reach of state-of-the-art time series forecasting models. Indeed, our findings and predictive model can be fruitfully used to support marketing strategies and product placement.}, author = {Giulio Rossetti and Letizia Milli and Fosca Giannotti and Dino Pedreschi} }