Diffusion Of Innovation Quotes

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Thus we see that the diffusion of innovations is a social process, even more than a technical matter.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
In order to become a better innovator, you're going to learn how to write songs.
Cliff Goldmacher (The Reason for the Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs)
Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Compatibility is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The five attributes of innovations are (1) relative advantage, (2) compatibility, (3) complexity, (4) trialability, and (5) observability.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Innovations that are perceived by individuals as having greater relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, observability, and less complexity will be adopted more rapidly than other innovations.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Each cooperative in Mondragon has its own workplace structure, though there are similarities and tendencies that most of them share. The firm called Irizar, which manufactures products for trans-portation, from luxury coaches to city buses, exemplifies these tendencies. To encourage innovation and the diffusion of knowledge, there are no bosses or departments in Irizar. Rather, it has a flat organizational structure based on work teams with a high degree of autonomy. (One study remarks that they “set their own targets, establish their own work schedules, [and] organize the work process as they see fit.”) The teams also work with each other, so that knowledge is transmitted efficiently. Participation occurs also in the general assembly, which meets three times a year rather than the single annual meeting common in other Mondragon firms. Its subsidiaries in other countries have at least two general assemblies a year, where they approve the company’s strategic plan, investments, etc. These participatory structures have enabled Irizar to surpass its competitors in profitability and market share.69
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
Even though the software component of a technology is often not so easy to observe, we should not forget that technology almost always represents a mixture of hardware and software aspects. According to our definition, technology is a means of uncertainty reduction that is made possible by information about the cause-effect relationships on which the technology is based.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites. The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions. Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production. Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation.
James Davison Hunter (To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World)
THE CHASM – THE DIFFUSION MODEL WHY EVERYBODY HAS AN IPOD Why is it that some ideas – including stupid ones – take hold and become trends, while others bloom briefly before withering and disappearing from the public eye? Sociologists describe the way in which a catchy idea or product becomes popular as ‘diffusion’. One of the most famous diffusion studies is an analysis by Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross of the diffusion of hybrid corn in the 1930s in Greene County, Iowa. The new type of corn was better than the old sort in every way, yet it took twenty-two years for it to become widely accepted. The diffusion researchers called the farmers who switched to the new corn as early as 1928 ‘innovators’, and the somewhat bigger group that was infected by them ‘early adaptors’. They were the opinion leaders in the communities, respected people who observed the experiments of the innovators and then joined them. They were followed at the end of the 1930s by the ‘sceptical masses’, those who would never change anything before it had been tried out by the successful farmers. But at some point even they were infected by the ‘hybrid corn virus’, and eventually transmitted it to the die-hard conservatives, the ‘stragglers’. Translated into a graph, this development takes the form of a curve typical of the progress of an epidemic. It rises, gradually at first, then reaches the critical point of any newly launched product, when many products fail. The critical point for any innovation is the transition from the early adaptors to the sceptics, for at this point there is a ‘chasm’. According to the US sociologist Morton Grodzins, if the early adaptors succeed in getting the innovation across the chasm to the sceptical masses, the epidemic cycle reaches the tipping point. From there, the curve rises sharply when the masses accept the product, and sinks again when only the stragglers remain. With technological innovations like the iPod or the iPhone, the cycle described above is very short. Interestingly, the early adaptors turn away from the product as soon as the critical masses have accepted it, in search of the next new thing. The chasm model was introduced by the American consultant and author Geoffrey Moore. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi
Mikael Krogerus (The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking)
The failure of competition is evident in the large and inexplicable differences in cost and quality for the same type of care across providers and across geographic areas. Competition does not reward the best providers, nor do weaker providers go out of business. Technological innovation diffuses slowly and does not drive value improvement the way it should; instead, it is seen by some as part of the problem. Taken together, these outcomes are inconceivable in a well-functioning market. They are intolerable in health care, with life and quality of life at stake. They are unsustainable in a sector that consumes a large and growing portion of the national budget.
Michael E. Porter (Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results)
are not diffused, multiple users with very similar needs will have to invest to (re)develop very similar innovations, which would be a poor use of resources from the social welfare point of view. Empirical research shows that new and modified products developed by users often do diffuse widely-and
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
Thus, it is suggested, a deeper understanding of the conditions affecting the speed and ultimate extent of an innovation's diffusion is to be obtained only by explicitly analyzing the specific choice of technique problem which its advent would have presented to objectively dissimilar members of the relevant (historical) population of potential adopters.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Economical Writing)
Life expectancy rose only modestly between the Neolithic era of 8500 to 3500 BC and the Victorian era of 1850 to 1900.13 An American born in the late nineteenth century had an average life expectancy of around forty-five years, with a large share never making it past their first birthdays.14 Then something remarkable happened. In countries on the frontier of economic development, human health began to improve rapidly, education levels shot up, and standards of living began to grow and grow. Within a century, life expectancies had increased by two-thirds, average years of schooling had gone from single to double digits, and the productivity of workers and the pay they took home had doubled and doubled and then doubled again. With the United States leading the way, the rich world crossed a Great Divide—a divide separating centuries of slow growth, poor health, and anemic technical progress from one of hitherto undreamed-of material comfort and seemingly limitless economic potential. For the first time, rich countries experienced economic development that was both broad and deep, reaching all major segments of society and producing not just greater material comfort but also fundamental transformations in the health and life horizons of those it touched. As the French economist Thomas Piketty points out in his magisterial study of inequality, “It was not until the twentieth century that economic growth became a tangible, unmistakable reality for everyone.”15 The mixed economy was at the heart of this success—in the United States no less than in other Western nations. Capitalism played an essential role. But capitalism was not the new entrant on the economic stage. Effective governance was. Public health measures made cities engines of innovation rather than incubators of illness.16 The meteoric expansion of public education increased not only individual opportunity but also the economic potential of entire societies. Investments in science, higher education, and defense spearheaded breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, infrastructure, and technology. Overarching rules and institutions tamed and transformed unstable financial markets and turned boom-bust cycles into more manageable ups and downs. Protections against excessive insecurity and abject destitution encouraged the forward-looking investments and social integration that sustained growth required. At every level of society, the gains in health, education, income, and capacity were breathtaking. The mixed economy was a spectacularly positive-sum bargain: It redistributed power and resources, but as its impacts broadened and diffused, virtually everyone was made massively better off.
Jacob S. Hacker (American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper)
law of diffusion of innovation,
Akash Karia (How to Design TED Worthy Presentation Slides: Presentation Design Principles from the Best TED Talks (How to Give a TED Talk Book 2))
When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low-which is the trend we have described-these resources can be diffused widely, and the allocation problem then diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. Democratization of
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
is clear that neither countries nor regions can flourish if their cities (innovation ecosystems) are not being continually nourished. Cities have been the engines of economic growth, prosperity and social progress throughout history, and will be essential to the future competitiveness of nations and regions. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, ranging from mid-size cities to megacities, and the number of city dwellers worldwide keeps rising. Many factors that affect the competitiveness of countries and regions – from innovation and education to infrastructure and public administration – are under the purview of cities. The speed and breadth by which cities absorb and deploy technology, supported by agile policy frameworks, will determine their ability to compete in attracting talent. Possessing a superfast broadband, putting into place digital technologies in transportation, energy consumption, waste recycling and so on help make a city more efficient and liveable, and therefore more attractive than others. It is therefore critical that cities and countries around the world focus on ensuring access to and use of the information and communication technologies on which much of the fourth industrial revolution depends. Unfortunately, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2015 points out, ICT infrastructures are neither as prevalent nor diffusing as fast as many people believe. “Half of the world’s population does not have mobile phones and 450 million people still live out of reach of a mobile signal. Some 90% of the population of low-income countries and over 60% globally are not online yet. Finally, most mobile phones are of an older generation.”45
Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual's prospects of success. Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present. Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home and a bad neighborhood. It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing, sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next generation.
Loren Eiseley
Let’s follow the causal chain I’ve been linking together: the spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.25
Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
The fourth industrial revolution, however, is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, from renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital and biological domains that make the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions. In this revolution, emerging technologies and broad-based innovation are diffusing much faster and more widely than in previous ones, which continue to unfold in some parts of the world. This second industrial revolution has yet to be fully experienced by 17% of world, as nearly 1.3 billion people still lack access to electricity. This is also true for the third industrial revolution, with more than half of the world’s population, 4 billion people, most of whom live in the developing world, lacking internet access. The spindle (the hallmark of the first industrial revolution) took almost 120 years to spread outside of Europe. By contrast, the internet permeated across the globe in less than a decade.
Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
I am convinced that the fourth industrial revolution will be every bit as powerful, impactful and historically important as the previous three. However, I have two primary concerns about factors that may limit the potential of the fourth industrial revolution to be effectively and cohesively realized. First, I feel that the required levels of leadership and understanding of the changes under way, across all sectors, are low when contrasted with the need to rethink our economic, social and political systems to respond to the fourth industrial revolution. As a result, both at the national and global levels, the requisite institutional framework to govern the diffusion of innovation and mitigate the disruption is inadequate at best and, at worst, absent altogether. Second, the world lacks a consistent, positive and common narrative that outlines the opportunities and challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, a narrative that is essential if we are to empower a diverse set of individuals and communities and avoid a popular backlash against the fundamental changes under way.
Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation.
Dwight McNeill (ANALYTICS FOR HEALTH: A Guide to Strategies and Tools from Business Intelligence, Population Health Management, and Person Centered Health)
The Law of Diffusion says that only 2.5 percent of the population has an innovator mentality — they are a group of people willing to trust their intuition and take greater risks than others.
Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
If Morton was on board with the diffused silicon transistor, Kelly was, too. That meant the future would be silicon.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
DIFFUSED SILICON had another use, too. Fifteen years had passed since the day Walter Brattain had been ushered into Mervin Kelly’s office to regard a strange piece of silicon that had been discovered down in Holmdel, New Jersey. The men had shone a light on the blackened chunk and the resulting electric charge had stunned them. In later years it came to be understood that this chunk of silicon contained a naturally occurring p-n junction where two types of silicon met. The junction is extremely photosensitive. In very general terms, the photons in light are hitting the semiconductor crystal and “splitting off” electrons from their normal location in the crystal; the process, if properly captured, can create a flow of electrons, that is, a flow of electricity.13 Kelly and Brattain and Ohl didn’t know it at the time, but in Kelly’s office the men had been looking at the world’s first crude silicon solar cell.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
Do not tax me with being a dangerous innovator; do not say that there is a risk of lightening, as perhaps these writings may do, the remorse in the malefactor’s heart, or that there is a greater evil in increasing, by the mildness of my system, the inclination these same malefactors have for their crimes; I here protest formally that I have no such perverse views; I am exposing those ideas which have been identified with me since I reached the age of reason, and against whose diffusion the infamous despotism of tyrants was directed for so many ages; so much the worse for those whom these great ideas would corrupt; so much the worse for those who can only catch hold of the evil in philosophical opinions and who are susceptible to corruption from everything; Who knows if they wouldn’t be tainted by reading Seneca or Charron! It is not those whom I speak to; I only address myself to people capable of understanding me, and such can read me without danger.
Geoffrey Gorer (The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade)
At the very least, it proved that even the great technical minds at Bell Labs, Jack Morton especially, could misjudge the future. “We had all the elements to make an integrated circuit,” Tanenbaum adds. “And all the processes—diffusion, photolithography—were developed at Bell Labs. But nobody had the foresight except Noyce and Kilby.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
A technology cluster consists of one or more distinguishable elements of technology that are perceived as being closely interrelated.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
In the 1970s, diffusion scholars began to study the concept of reinvention, defined as the degree to which an innovation is changed or modified by a user in the process of its adoption and implementation.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
For example, the villagers in Los Molinas did not understand germ theory, which the health worker tried to explain to them as a reason for boiling their drinking water.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Solar adopters often are found in neighborhood clusters in California, with three or four adopters located on the same block. Other consumer innovations like home computers are relatively less observable, and thus diffuse more slowly.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
At its most elementary form, the process involves (1) an innovation, (2) an individual or other unit of adoption that has knowledge of the innovation or experience with using it, (3) another individual or other unit that does not yet have experience with the innovation, and (4) a communication channel connecting the two units. A communication channel is the means by which messages get from one individual to another.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
While consumer innovations like mobile telephones or VCRs may require only a few years to reach widespread adoption in the United States, other new ideas such as the metric system or using seat belts in cars require decades to reach complete use. The characteristics of innovations, as perceived by individuals, help to explain their different rate of adoption.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Ryan and Gross (1943) found that every one of their Iowa farmer respondents adopted hybrid seed corn by first trying it on a partial basis.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Diffusion investigations show that most individuals do not evaluate an innovation on the basis of scientific studies of its consequences, although such objective evaluations are not entirely irrelevant, especially to the very first individuals who adopt. Instead, most people depend mainly upon a subjective evaluation of an innovation that is conveyed to them from other individuals like themselves who have previously adopted the innovation
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
This tendency for more effective communication to occur with those who are more similar to a change agent occurs in most diffusion campaigns. Unfortunately, those individuals who most need the help provided by the change agent are least likely to accept it.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
A further refinement of this proposition includes the concept of empathy, defined as the ability of an individual to project into the role of another. More effective communication occurs when two individuals are homophilous, unless they have high empathy. Heterophilous individuals who have a high degree of empathy are, in a socio-psychological sense, really homophilous. The proposition about effective communication and homophily can also be reversed: Effective communication between two individuals leads to greater homophily in knowledge, beliefs, and overt behavior.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
We conceptualize five main steps in the innovation-decision process: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision, (4) implementation, and (5) confirmation.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
These communication messages created awareness-knowledge of the innovation among the medical community, but such scientific evaluations of the new drug were not sufficient to persuade the average doctor to adopt. Subjective evaluations of the new drug, based on the personal experiences of a doctor’s peers, were key to convincing the typical doctor to adopt gammanym for his own patients. When an office partner said to a colleague: “Look doctor, I prescribe gammanym for my patients, and it cures them more effectively than other antibiotics,” that kind of message often had an effect.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The newer arrangement requires less jumping back and forth from row to row; with the QWERTY keyboard, a good typists’ fingertips travel more than twelve miles a day, jumping from row to row. These unnecessary intricate movements cause mental tension, typist fatigue, and lead to more typographical errors.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
An innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
This intensive two-year campaign by a public health worker in a Peruvian village of 200 families, aimed at persuading housewives to boil drinking water, was largely unsuccessful. Nelida was able to encourage only about 5 percent of the population, eleven families, to adopt the innovation. The diffusion campaign in Los Molinas failed because of the cultural beliefs of the villagers. Local tradition links hot foods with illness. Boiling water makes water less “cold” and hence, appropriate only for the sick. But if a person is not ill, the individual is prohibited by village norms from drinking boiled water. Only individuals who are unintegrated into local networks risk defying community norms on water boiling. An important factor regarding the adoption rate of an innovation is its compatibility with the values, beliefs, and past experiences of individuals in the social system. Nelida and her superiors in the public health agency should have understood the hot-cold belief system, as it is found throughout Peru (and in most nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Here is an example of an indigenous knowledge system that caused the failure of a development program.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The QWERTY keyboard is inefficient and awkward. This typewriter keyboard takes twice as long to learn as it should, and makes us work about twenty times harder than is necessary. But QWERTY has persisted since 1873, and today unsuspecting individuals are being taught to use the QWERTY keyboard, unaware that a much more efficient typewriter keyboard is available.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
A fad is an innovation that represents a relatively unimportant aspect of culture, which diffuses very rapidly, mainly for status reasons, and then is rapidly discontinued.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Other examples of fads are hula hoops, mood rings, flip-up sunglasses, and umbrella-hats.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The adoption of other highly visible innovations like new cars and hair styles is especially likely to be status motivated.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Family planning experts, in calculating the effects of contraceptive campaigns, estimate the number of births averted by calculating the pregnancies that would have occurred if contraceptives had not been adopted; the concept of births averted is not very meaningful to a peasant family in a Third World country that is being urged to adopt a preventive innovation like family planning.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
An illustration of a diffuser incentive is that paid to vasectomy canvassers in India (described in Chapter 9). These canvassers had each had the vasectomy operation themselves, and then earned a small incentive by convincing other men like themselves to adopt.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Positive versus negative incentives. Most incentives are positive in that they reward a desired behavior change (like adoption of a new idea), but it is also possible to penalize an individual by imposing an unwanted penalty or by withdrawing some desiderata for not adopting an innovation. For example, the government of Singapore decreed that the mother in any family that has a third (or further) child is not eligible to receive maternity leave and that the parents must pay all hospital and delivery costs (which are otherwise free to all citizens).
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The degree of relative advantage may be measured in economic terms, but social prestige, convenience, and satisfaction are also important factors.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
An example of an incompatible innovation is the use of contraceptive methods in countries where religious beliefs discourage use of family planning, as in Moslem and Catholic nations.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
More effective communication occurs when two or more individuals are homophilous.III When they share common meanings, a mutual subcultural language, and are alike in personal and social characteristics, the communication of new ideas is likely to have greater effects in terms of knowledge gain, attitude formation and change, and overt behavior change.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The prejudice of [research] training is always a certain ‘trained incapacity’: The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
When villagers in Third World countries are asked in surveys, “What is the most important problem in your life?” they consistently respond, “Water.” Typically, village families walk several miles to obtain a reliable source of water, and three to four hours per day are spent by water-gatherers in carrying the water to their home.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Because of the pro-innovation bias, we know much more (1) about the diffusion of rapidly spreading innovations than about the diffusion of slowly diffusing innovations, (2) about adoption than about rejection, and (3) about continued use than about discontinuance
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Typewriters became mechanically more efficient, and the QWERTY keyboard design was no longer necessary to prevent key jamming. The search for an improved design was led by Professor August Dvorak at the University of Washington, who in 1932 used time-and-motion studies to create a much more efficient keyboard arrangement.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The results were so clear that one would expect the British Navy to adopt citrus juice for scurvy prevention on all its ships. But it was not until 1747, about 150 years later, that James Lind, a British Navy physician who knew of Lancaster’s results, carried out another experiment on the HMS Salisbury.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The result was an “agricultural revolution” in which the number of persons fed and clothed by the average American farmer shot up from fourteen in 1950, to twenty-six in 1960, to forty-seven in 1970.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
What Is Diffusion? Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Most innovations, in fact, diffuse at a disappointingly slow rate. Scurvy control illustrates how slowly an obviously beneficial innovation spreads (Mosteller, 1981). In the early days of long sea voyages, scurvy was a worse killer of sailors than warfare, accidents, and all other causes of death. For instance, of Vasco de Gama’s crew of 160 men who sailed with him around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, 100 died of scurvy.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Certainly, with this further solid evidence of the ability of citrus fruits to combat scurvy, one would expect the British Navy to adopt this technological innovation for all ship’s crews on long sea voyages, and in fact, it did so. But not until 1795, forty-eight years later. Scurvy was immediately wiped out. And after only seventy more years, in 1865, the British Board of Trade adopted a similar policy, and eradicated scurvy in the merchant marine.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
One might expect, on the basis of its overwhelming advantages, that the Dvorak keyboard would have completely replaced the inferior QWERTY keyboard. On the contrary, after more than 50 years, almost all typists are still using the inefficient QWERTY keyboard.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Diffusion Is the Process by Which (1) an Innovation (2) Is Communicated Through Certain Channels (3) Over Time (4) Among the Members of a Social System
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
In 1971, tobacco companies were stopped from running their radio and television advertising
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
For example, until the mid-1960s, airline flight attendants distributed free packets of cigarettes with after-meal coffee. In the late 1980s, U.S. airlines banned smoking from all domestic flights.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The average American school lags twenty-five years behind the best practice” (Mort, 1953).
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT as an insecticide because of its threats to human health.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
An important factor regarding the adoption rate of an innovation is its compatibility with the values, beliefs, and past experiences of individuals in the social system.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
In the absence of these solid-state components and devices, the world of the early 1970s was one of new high-yielding wheat and rice cultivars, of efficient gas turbines (stationary in electricity generation, and powering wide-body jetliners), of large container ships, of growing megacities, of telecommunication and weather satellites, and of antibiotics and vaccines. All too obviously, a high-energy, high-quality-of-life affluent civilization is not based on post-1971 electronics: the development and diffusion of electronics have been welcome and helpful and valuable, but most definitely not fundamental.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
Unless an innovation is highly compatible with clients’ needs and resources, and unless clients feel so involved with the innovation that they regard it as “theirs,” it will not be continued over the long term.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Heterophilous communication between dissimilar individuals may cause cognitive dissonance because an individual is exposed to messages that are inconsistent with existing beliefs, an uncomfortable psychological state.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
He reimagined Ahura Mazdā as a unitive creative force (whereas before him divine agency was diffuse or unattributable), and as a consequence Zoroaster is often credited with innovating monotheism.
Mark S. Ferrara (Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis)
Again, as in the Ryan and Gross (1943) study of hybrid seed corn and thousands of other diffusion investigations conducted since, we see that the diffusion process requires a considerable period of time. The innovation process does not happen instantly, even when an organization’s leaders are strongly in favor of a new communication technology.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
Societal mores, religious beliefs and more importantly, traditions and habits impede the diffusion of innovations; alterations of behavioral patterns and practices require change, many adamantly oppose.
RJ Intindola – (Gandolfo) – 2006
Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present.
Leonard Everett Fisher (The Night Country: A Library of America eBook Classic)
Rigidity traps are sustained by increasing control exerted by large-scale processes and minimizing or eliminating small-scale processes. Rigidity traps are the result of sustained hierarchical controls (in the form of power, resources, and manipulation) that suppress innovation, diversity, and experimentation (Gunderson et al. 2018). In contrast, systems in poverty traps can be characterized by the lack of critical types of larger-scale inputs (memory, resources) and the inability to constrain or adapt to small-scale perturbations. When a system is in a poverty trap, small-scale disturbances lead to crises and reorganizations that sustain trajectories of continued poverty conditions.
Lance H. Gunderson (Applied Panarchy: Applications and Diffusion across Disciplines)
that can also benefit from them. If user innovations are not diffused, multiple users with very similar needs will have to invest to (re)develop very similar innovations, which would be a poor use of resources from the social welfare point of view. Empirical research
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)
The theory posits that in the early stages of a technology, the rate of progress in performance will be relatively slow. As the technology becomes better understood, controlled, and diffused, the rate of technological improvement will accelerate. 12 But in its mature stages, the technology will asymptotically approach a natural or physical limit such that ever greater periods of time or inputs of engineering effort will be required to achieve improvements. Figure 2.5 illustrates the resulting pattern.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail)