Diffusion of Innovations Musings

by | Sep 18, 2014 | Diffusion, Instructional Design, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Introduction

I learned of Rodger’s Diffusion of Innovations insights more years ago than I care to admit. As a learning designer and education technologist who supports faculty in improving their teaching practices, it just made sense to me. It still does. Yet time and again, I’ve seen innovations fail due to lack of efforts to maximize the probability of diffusion success. Thus, I wanted to formalize my thoughts in this area in the hope that it might benefit others who walk a path similar to mine. Enjoy, comment, and criticize!

Creator of the Theory

Everett M. Rogers. His first edition of the book of the same title was published in 1962, while he was an assistant professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University.

Definition

Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time via certain channels to members of a community.

Major Factors

Four major factors influence diffusion:

  1. The innovation itself.
  2. How the innovation is communicated to a community or communities.
  3. Time available to adopt the innovation.
  4. The nature of the social system or community in which the innovation is introduced.

The Innovation Adoption Process

Five stages exist in the innovation adoption process

  1. Knowledge – This initially must be given to the adopters.
  2. Persuasion – The potential adopter is interested enough to seek out additional information.
  3. Decision – The potential adopter rejects or accepts the innovation for continued consideration.
  4. Implementation – The adopter tries the innovation, determines usefulness, and seeks out additional information if needed.
  5. Confirmation – Adoption is successful. The adopter decides to continue to use the innovation.

Adopter Categories and Individual Innovativeness

Five types of adopters exist:

  • Innovators (2.5%)
  • Early Adopters (13.5%)
  • Early Majority (34%)
  • Late Majority (34%)
  • Laggards (16%)

The adopters, their respective relative percentages, and the order in which they adopt an innovation (from left to right) can be viewed on a traditional bell curve. See Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Adopters Graph

A bell-shaped curve showing the types of adopters, their respective percentages of the curve they occupy, and the chasm that puts a break in the curve in the early adopter section.

There is a place in the early adopters phase known as “The Chasm,” where many innovations fail.

Innovators are those “crazy folks” who are willing to try nearly anything. Often, they come to you with the innovation! They require minimal persuasion, minimal guidance, and often surprise you with their novel uses of the innovation and their solutions to encountered barriers. Thus, they are easy to work with. These are your champions! Promote them to others – showcase their work.

Early adopters are those individuals that just need a nudge to try something, provided you show a commitment to enable them to succeed.

Early majority folk want to see the success of the innovators and early adopters before they’ll exhibit buy in. You have to have formal structures in place to assist them – in other words, the innovation is already adopted by the organization and exhibits stability – or at least it’s clear that this is soon to happen.

Late majority individuals will only come on board once they are absolutely convinced the innovation is a good thing, has plenty of support, and is more of less considered status quo.

Laggards are individuals who will most likely never adopt the innovation unless forced to do so. Even then they may exhibit covert or overt dissatisfaction over the innovation.

Also, you may encounter Leapfroggers – Individuals or groups who skip over several generations of an innovation to adopt the latest thing. They may seem to be laggards up to this point and thus surprise you. Example: Parts of Africa skipping over a telephone Internet infrastructure, followed by a landline-based Internet infrastructure to go directly to cell phones and wireless, satellite-based Internet access.

Perceived Attributes of an Innovation

Five factors exist that lead to acceptance or rejection of an innovation:

  1. Relative Advantage – What’s better about the innovation from what currently exists?
  2. Compatibility – How well does the innovation fit into existing processes and ways of doing things?
  3. Complexity – Is it too difficult to use?
  4. Trialability – How easy is it to explore and temporarily implement on a safe, limited scale?
  5. Observability – How visible is it to others?

Climate for Innovation

This is tied to the fourth major factor that influences the diffusion of an innovation – the social system or community in which the innovation is introduced. A strong implementation climate fosters innovation use by:

  1. Ensuring employee skill in using the innovation.
  2. Providing incentives for innovation use.
  3. Providing disincentives for non-use.
  4. Removing obstacles to innovation use.

Implementation Effectiveness Measures

Implementation is gaining targeted organizational members use of an innovation.

Implementation is the transition period during which targeted organizational members become increasingly skillful, consistent, and committed in their use of an innovation.

Four main quantifiable measures exist:

  1. Strength of the organization’s climate for change.
  2. Fit to the user’s values.
  3. Benefits an organization receives as a result of using the organization.
  4. Organizational level construct – used by the organization, not just individuals.

These measures may be quantified fairly easily. They may also be used prior to the introduction of an innovation to determine how effective implementation might be and thus guide implementation strategies.

Other qualitative measures of implementation effectiveness include source versus used-based perspectives and innovation-value fit.

Perspectives Used to Describe the Innovation Process

  1. Source-based. Tracing the creation of new products/services from start to finish from the perspective of the organization, developer, or inventor.
  2. Used-based. Examines the perspective of the user. Tracing the innovation from user’s first awareness of the innovation.

Implementation effectiveness is best described by the dual influence of source-based and user-based perspectives.

Innovations-Values Fit

How well does the innovation match the user’s group needs?

How to Leverage This for Your Projects

Develop an implementation plan for each of the five stages of the innovation adoption process. Although the steps listed here are done so in a linear fashion, in reality the entire process is somewhat mushy, and these steps may occur concurrently or dovetail in their implementation. I’ve also stretched the classical definition of these stages because of this mushiness, and in order to include some information I feel is critical for a successful implementation. In particular, I feel the Persuasion stage is also where people might try the innovation on a limited scale, prior to the Decision stage.

  1. Knowledge – This is your initial release of information of the innovation. It has to concise, a bit flashy, and should include some basic information about the perceived attributes of the innovation:
    1. Relative Advantage – Describe what’s better about the innovation from what currently exists. If possible, explain how it will save time, money, and for Higher Education, lead to better teaching and learning. Are there research and publishing opportunities here? List them.
    2. Compatibility – Explain how this innovation will work with existing structures and practice. Tie this to relative advantage if possible.
    3. Complexity – If there are potential show-stopping complexities, what is your organization doing to assist adopters to overcome them? What is your organization doing to eliminate or reduce these complexities? While it may seem beneficial to downplay these complexities, it’s better to be honest at this point. You may be surprised by the solutions early adopters come up with that you can leverage for the early majority to avoid “The Chasm.”
    4. Trialability – Make it easy to try the innovation and provide support in the form of initial pilot training, documentation, consultations, pointers to external resources, and technological and help desk support. All this ties to the initial development of a climate of innovation.
    5. Observability – Promote the successes of early adopters through demonstrations, webinars, and publishing opportunities. Do this at the local (relative to the early adopter) level (e.g., within a department) but also at a broader, organizational level. In Higher Education, “faculty speak to faculty” far better than any other group.
  2. Persuasion – How will you encourage your existing adopters – most likely the innovators, early adopters, and possibly gatekeepers (people, departments, etc. from whom you must have buy in) – to press forward? Consider building a Wiki or open Knowledge Base to which adopters can add information, tips and tricks, things to avoid, and best practices. This is beginning of building an ad hoc community of practice around the innovation. Who are your gatekeepers? Bend over backwards to include them in the process from the very beginning, addressing their concerns as they occur. Failure to do so may cause them to reject the innovation, and then (unless you have an extremely high top-down, must-implement decree) the innovation is dead.
  3. Decision – Although listed as step three in a seemingly linear process, the truth is the “kill” decision could come at any point. What are your recovery plans for your existing innovators and early adopters? Again, be honest and up front with people trying to implement the innovation. You’ll have other innovations to try in the future, and you’ll need these folks on your side!
  4. Implementation – Formalize your training, documentation, consultations, and technological and help desk support so all are centrally supported. You should have your climate for innovation solidly developed by now.
  5. Confirmation – If you’ve succeeded at the above suggestions, you’ve greatly increased the chance that individual, departments, etc. will adopt the innovation.

Conclusion

Innovations can take root or die within an organization for many reasons. The techniques/thoughts here are not a formula for success; rather they are processes you can implement to greatly increase the likelihood of a successful diffusion of an innovation.

References

Diffusion of Innovations (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 17, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

Klein, K. J. (1996). The challenge of innovation implementation. Academy of management review, 21(4), 1055-1080.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.

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