DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS

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DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS
(1) Rogers Diffusion of Innovation (2) Cowans
The Consumption Junction (3) Opening the black
box of technology diffusion
Elisa Oreglia
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Technological Determinism
Social Determinism
Technological Change ? one artifacts supplants
another Technological Determinism ? an artifact
reorganizes social structures Technological
Diffusion ? how an artifact diffuses through
society (Cowan, p261)
The Social-Technical Continuum?
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Diffusion of Innovations The Core Question

• How do consumers arrive at the decision to
  choose one technology over its alternative?

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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers
http//www.designdamage.com/when-to-adopt-social-m
edia-for-your-business/
http//blog.kitetail.com/2007/09/12/could-accelera
ted-diffusion-rate-negatively-impact-innovations/
http//suewaters.wikispaces.com/Rogers
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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers

• Rogers rural sociologist, son of farmers,
  interested in agricultural issues in US and
  developing countries
• Categorizing the Adopters of Agricultural
  Practices (1958)
• Characteristics of Agricultural Innovators and
  Other Adopter Categories (1961)
• Diffusion of Innovation (1962-2003)
• Rogers the I School
• Emphasis on diffusion as information-exchange
  among participants in a communication process
  (xvi preface 1995 edition)
• The diffusion of innovations is essentially a
  social process in which subjectively perceived
  information about a new idea is communicated. The
  meaning of an innovation is thus gradually worked
  out through a process of social construction.
  (xvii 1995)

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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers
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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers

• 4 elements of diffusion
• Innovation (perception of innovation)
• Communication Channels
• Time
• Social Systems
• Vignettes
• Btw The Fable of the Keys http//www.utdallas.e
  du/liebowit/keys1.html

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Diffusion of Technology - Cowan

• asking both what interest such a consumer
  might have had and what sort of network might
  have existed at that time to bring a stove into a
  home. (Cowan, p269)
• Failure Success are equally important to
  understand diffusion
• Stoves past and present of diffusion
  (http//www.aprovecho.org/lab/index.php)

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Diffusion of Technology - Cowan
Cowan, p270
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Diffusion Opening the black box experiment
Goal To open up the black box of diffusion
(the final stage). (Cowan) What Drawing from
todays readings, devise a plan for Nokia to
regain market share in mobile phones - group
work (4-5 people), presentations, discussion -
be as general or as specific as you wish (e.g.
company-wide plan, or target a specific
country/age group/etc) - use specific
concepts from the readings (e.g. concepts like
opinion leaders/change agents, perceived
attributes of innovations, etc if referring to
Rogers, who sold, at what price, were there
wholesalers, etc if referring to Cowan)
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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers

• Importance of DoI research
• Diffusion follows a pattern
• Importance of social networks (strength of weak
  ties follows in the wake)
• Xiao et al. on Diffusion Games (The rich
  traces users leave in the form of social networks
  and interactions online have started to enable
  researchers to conduct large-scale studies of
  diffusion patterns p2)
• Attention to marginal populations developing
  countries
• Work-in-progress

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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers

• Critiques to DoI
• Innovation what is it, exactly?
• Time on/off? Long-term?
• Social Systems
• The problem of the network described by Cowan

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Diffusion of Innovations - Rogers

• (self)-criticism of DoI (ch.3)
• Pro-innovation bias (innovation should be
  diffused and adopted by all members of a social
  system, should be diffused more rapidly, the
  innovation should be neither reinvented nor
  rejected. p100)
• Individual blame (If the shoe doesnt fit,
  theres something wrong with your foot p115)
• Time variable difficult to measure because it
  relies on recall
• Problems in determining causality
  (Cross-sectional survey data are unable to
  answer many of the why questions about
  diffusion The pro-innovation bias in diffusion
  research, and the overwhelming reliance on
  correlational analysis of survey data, often let
  in the past to avoiding or ignoring the issue of
  causality among the variables of study. p123)
• Equality problem (esp. in relation to developing
  countries)

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Diffusion of Innovations Descriptive, yes
Predictive?
The S-Shaped curve only describes cases of
successful innovation, in which an innovation
spreads to almost all of the potential adopters
in a social system. Many, many innovations are
not successful. The S-curve, it must be
remembered, is innovation-specific and
system-specific, describing the diffusion of a
particular new idea among the member-units of a
particular system, The S-curve of diffusion is so
ubiquitous that students of diffusion may expect
every innovation to be adopted over time in an
S-shaped pattern. However, some innovations do
not display an S-shaped rate of adoption, perhaps
for some idiosyncratic reason or another The
main point here is not to assume than an S-shaped
rate of adoption is an inevitability. Rather, the
shape of the adopter distribution for an
innovation ought to be regarded as an open
question, to be determined empirically. (Rogers,
p261)
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Technological Determinism
Social Determinism
The Social-Technical Continuum