Everett Rogers Quotes

Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis.

Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes.

Compatibility is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters.

Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use.

Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.

The five attributes of innovations are (1) relative advantage, (2) compatibility, (3) complexity, (4) trialability, and (5) observability.

The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently

Thus we see that the diffusion of innovations is a social process, even more than a technical matter.

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.

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.

plenty of instances of the persecution of inventors, even to quite a late date. It is impossible, of course, to say how many good things were lost to the world by the pig-headedness which discouraged new inventions. It is marvellous to think what progress single men made, who had to begin almost at the beginning, and learn for themselves what every intelligent boy or girl now finds ready for him in the Cyclopædia. It is very clear that the same beginnings were made again and again by some of the early inventors. Then, what they learned had been almost forgotten. There was no careful record of their experiments, or, if any, it was in one manuscript, and that was not accessible to people trying to follow in their steps. "I have laid out for you," said Uncle Fritz, "some of the early accounts of Friar Bacon,—Roger

A technology cluster consists of one or more distinguishable elements of technology that are perceived as being closely interrelated.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We conceptualize five main steps in the innovation-decision process: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision, (4) implementation, and (5) confirmation.

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.

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.

An innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.

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.

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.

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.

Other examples of fads are hula hoops, mood rings, flip-up sunglasses, and umbrella-hats.

The adoption of other highly visible innovations like new cars and hair styles is especially likely to be status motivated.

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.

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.

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).

The degree of relative advantage may be measured in economic terms, but social prestige, convenience, and satisfaction are also important factors.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In 1971, tobacco companies were stopped from running their radio and television advertising

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.

The average American school lags twenty-five years behind the best practice” (Mort, 1953).

In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT as an insecticide because of its threats to human health.

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.

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.

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.

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.