What Is Innovation? Part II (Social Model of Technology Adoption)

In the first post on “What Is Innovation? Part I (Concepts and Examples)” we defined what innovation is and gave two examples, one of them about “Tablets”. We explained why the first Tablet created by Microsoft in 2001 could not be considered an innovation, while 9 years later Apple, without being the inventor of the Tablet, released the iPad and took “a big slice of the pie” in the Tablet market, which is why the iPad is considered an innovation.

In this post we are going to explain what these “Social models of technology adoption” are about, and we will try to relate them to new examples.

Social models of technology adoption.

There are several social models of technology adoption, but the models by Everett Rogers and Frank Bass are the ones that have had the greatest impact and are the most frequently cited. In this article we are going to present and explain Rogers’ model, which is perhaps the one most often mentioned when talking about these topics.

 E. Rogers carried out a study, which he explains in his book “Diffusion of Innovation”, to classify users according to how they adopt or assimilate new technologies. After this study he classified users into 5 categories known as Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. Rogers then assigned a certain percentage of users that each of these groups should have, and he represented them as follows:

This representation is quite striking because he not only ventured to classify users, but also to give figures for the percentage of users making up each group. However, this representation is nothing more than a categorization based on a normal distribution, which makes me think (and I mean Ricardo Moya, the author of this post) that Rogers’ study and categorization were fairly basic and simple, although very close to reality, since after all it is based on a normal distribution. Opinions aside, Rogers defined the characteristics of each of these groups of users:

1.- Innovators: They are often called “Freaks”, “Geeks”, “Nerds”, etc., and they are the first group of people to adopt a new technology. In general, they are people who like to discover new things and be up to date on everything technology-related.

2.- Early Adopters (Visionaries): These are people who dare to adopt new technologies when they believe the technology will be useful to them and will bring them some kind of benefit or well-being. This group of “Early Adopters” is perhaps the most important one for a product to succeed in the market, because the Early Adopters are the ones who “advertise” the new product in some way if it is truly good and they are happy with it.

3.- Early Majority (Pragmatists): This is an important group to keep in mind. These are people who, without being curious about new technologies, are willing to use them.

4.- Late Majority (Conservatives): This group is very similar to the “Early Majority”, but in this case they are people who “distrust” innovations and are therefore a bit more reluctant to adopt new technologies.

5.- Laggards (Skeptics): These are quite “Anti-Technology” and very traditional people. They usually adopt products only when there is strong pressure around them to adopt new technologies.

This is how Rogers classified users when it comes to technology adoption. He also defined a “chasm”, which is a social break point where the last “Early Adopters” and the first “Early Majority” are considerably different people, and so it is a point where it is hard to get new people to adopt the technologies used by the Early Adopters and the Innovators.

Now that we have explained the theory, let’s look at an example, and of course we will use an Apple one: “The iPhone”.

A few years ago, in July 2008, the iPhone (the iPhone 3G) went on sale in many countries around the world, Spain among them. Although today a lot of people have an iPhone and everybody knows what it is, it is true that in 2008 very few people knew what “that iPhone thing” was, and only the “Innovators” bought an iPhone back then. To put it in context, at that time iPhones in Spain were only sold by Telefónica (MoviStar) at its headquarters on Gran Vía street, and the price of the iPhone was relatively high (around 359 euros) compared to what people were spending on a phone back then. So despite the long lines to get the iPhone 3G, very few people at that time were willing to buy one. In short: in mid-2008 only the Innovators had an iPhone in Spain.

As time went by, iPhones in particular and smartphones in general gained more traction in society, and little by little the “Early Adopters” started buying an iPhone, probably an iPhone 3GS by then. Without going into much detail, we can say that the iPhone 3G was the iPhone of the “Innovators” and the iPhone 3GS was the iPhone of the “Early Adopters”.

By the beginning or middle of 2010 in Spain, everybody knew what the iPhone was and the “Early Majority” started buying iPhones, maybe the iPhone 3GS or the iPhone 4. Needless to say, today everybody knows what an iPhone is and now “even the dumbest person” (as people say) has an iPhone. I don’t know whether you can say the iPhone has already reached the “Laggards”, but I think it has definitely reached the “Late Majority”.

In the following image, we can see the evolution of iPhone sales from the third quarter of 2007 (when the original iPhone was on the market but was not sold worldwide) to the last quarter of 2012. You can see how sales evolved, and that this evolution follows the adoption of the iPhone in society. This chart can be a bit misleading, since I have no doubt that the iPhone “Innovators” bought every new iPhone that came out, but the trend can still be seen perfectly:

This topic of social models of technology adoption is a very important one to keep in mind for innovation processes, since it is the job of innovation departments to know what their potential customers are like and how they will adopt new products. It is true that Rogers’ model is very generic and based on a normal distribution. It can serve as a reference, but let’s never assume it applies to every case, because depending on how innovative the product is, the model can vary considerably.

References:

[1] Part of this knowledge was taught in the course “Innovation as a tool for developing Software products” of the Master’s in “Computer Science and Technology” at the UPM, taught by Professor Juan Garbajosa.

[2] Rogers, E. M. (1962, latest edition 2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.