Everett Rogers
Everett Rogers (rural-sociology professor) originated the modern theory of innovation diffusion in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations — synthesizing 508+ diffusion studies across anthropology, sociology, education, and medicine into one framework. The founding figure of this wiki’s cluster F, much as vannevar-bush anchors the memex lineage in cluster A.
Contribution
Defined diffusion (“an innovation communicated through certain channels over time among the participants in a social system”), the five adopter categories and S-curve of the technology-adoption-curve, the four elements (innovation, channels, time, social system), and the five adoption attributes (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability). His model is the substrate every later framework here adapts.
Stance vs. Moore
Rogers disputed geoffrey-moore‘s chasm, holding that innovativeness is “a continuous variable” with no sharp gap between adopter categories — the continuous-vs- discontinuous tension flagged in synthesis.
Related
diffusion-of-innovations-wikipedia · technology-adoption-curve · crossing-the-chasm · geoffrey-moore