  Innovation diffusion in the networked population is an essential process that
drives the progress of human society. Despite the recent advances in network
science, a fundamental understanding of network properties that regulate such
processes is still lacking. Focusing on an innovation diffusion model with
pairwise transmission and macro-level social influence, i.e., more adopters in
the networked population lead to a higher adoption tendency among the remaining
individuals, we observe discontinuous phase transitions when the influence is
sufficiently strong. Through extensive analyses of a large corpus of empirical
networks, we show that the tricritical point depends on the network
localization strength, which our newly proposed metric can effectively
quantify. The metric reveals the deep connection between the critical and
tricritical points and further indicates a trade-off: networks that allow less
attractive products to prevail tend to yield slower diffusion and lower market
penetration and verse versa. Guided by this trade-off, we demonstrate how
marketers can rewire the networks to modulate product diffusion according to
their needs.
