IO9.com reports about a new research (that you can download here) in which Swiss researchers have compiled a “Thought Leader Map” by using a network analysis similar to the page-rank algorithm used by Google.

If you want to know the top 3, check this quote from IO9:

First place went to Richard Florida, the American urban studies theorist. Finishing in second was Thilo Sarrazin, a controversial German economist and politician. And third went to Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Many of the thinkers listed are economists, but there are a decent number of science-minded and futurist thinkers, including Douglas Rushkoff, Matt Ridley, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Peter Diamondis, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Kevin Kelly, and Stephen Hawking (among others).

Abstract of the research:

Which thinkers are we guided by? A novel “Thought Leader Map” shows the select group of people with real influence who are setting the trends in the market for ideas. The influencers in philosophy, sociology, economics, and the “hard sciences” have been identified by a Delphi process, asking 50 thought leaders to name their peers. The importance of the influencers is calculated by constructing a cooccurrence network in the Blogosphere. Our main insight is that the era of the great authorities seems to be over. Major thought leaders are rare – the picture is composed of many specialists.