The Diffusion of Innovation

In his classic, The Diffusion of Innovation (1962, updated 2003), Rogers proposed that: “Individuals in a social system do not all adopt an innovation at the same time. Rather, they adopt in an over-time sequence.” He describes this sequence as a distribution on the basis of ‘innovativeness’ — “the degree to which an individual… is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than other members of a social system”. The most likely to adopt an innovation are Innovators (2.5% of the population), followed by Early Adopters (13.5%), and so on.