Diffusion of Innovations (Wikipedia)

Neutral reference source for cluster F’s founding theory — Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (1962), synthesizing 508+ diffusion studies. Backs technology-adoption-curve and everett-rogers.

Key content

• Definition: diffusion is “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the participants in a social system”; an innovation is “any idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new.”
• Five adopter categories (% of population): innovators ~2.5, early adopters ~13.5, early majority ~34, late majority ~34, laggards ~16 — the technology-adoption-curve.
• Four elements: innovation, communication channels, time, social system.
• S-curve & critical mass: cumulative adoption is S-shaped; self-sustaining at critical mass. (Regis McKenna’s consultants later coined the “marketing chasm” between early adopters and early majority — the seed of crossing-the-chasm.)
• Five attributes predicting adoption speed: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability.

Critiques (per the article)

Pro-innovation bias (assumes adoption is always good); measurement difficulty (human networks are complex); one-way communication model; and despite 4,000+ papers, a noted lack of cohesion / stagnation in applying it to new problems.

Caveat

A tertiary encyclopedia summary; good for the canonical model, not primary scholarship.

Related

technology-adoption-curve · everett-rogers · crossing-the-chasm · gartner-hype-cycle