INNOVATORS AND EARLY ADOPTERS IN THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS: A LITERATURE REVIEW

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Despite accounting for a very small percentage of the population that adopts an innovation, the ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ — representing the two earliest groups of individuals to acquire the new product or service — play a crucial role in the dissemination of the innovation to larger market segments. The objective of this paper is to understand the characteristics of these individuals that positively influence their decisions to adopt innovations. We argue that awareness of these traits will enable firms to attain speedier uptake of their offerings while aiding policymakers achieve quicker and wider proliferation of new technologies intended for societal benefit. We undertake a review of the literature studying the diffusion of innovations and show future directions that this framework should take to analyse the adoption lifecycle.

Related collections

Most cited references 72

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Hybrid Corn: An Exploration in the Economics of Technological Change

Zvi Griliches (1957)

0 comments Cited 392 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

An experimental study of homophily in the adoption of health behavior.

Damon Centola (2011)

How does the composition of a population affect the adoption of health behaviors and innovations? Homophily--similarity of social contacts--can increase dyadic-level influence, but it can also force less healthy individuals to interact primarily with one another, thereby excluding them from interactions with healthier, more influential, early adopters. As a result, an important network-level effect of homophily is that the people who are most in need of a health innovation may be among the least likely to adopt it. Despite the importance of this thesis, confounding factors in observational data have made it difficult to test empirically. We report results from a controlled experimental study on the spread of a health innovation through fixed social networks in which the level of homophily was independently varied. We found that homophily significantly increased overall adoption of a new health behavior, especially among those most in need of it.