Blog Post #7: Diffusion of Innovation

What is Diffusion of Innovation?

The Diffusion of Innovation Theory was created in 1962 by a sociologist named Evertt M. Rogers. This theory tries to explain how over time, innovations or ideas are spread through a certain population. The diffusion of innovation is usually shown in a graph where you can see that there are five different groups that people can be split into when it comes to the spread of ideas or innovation. These groups are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggers, each of which means show a different part of the spread.

Now let's look at innovation through the lens of the Diffusion of Innovation Theory. The innovation I want to look at is PC or personal computers. A short history of the PC is that the first PC came out in 1975 with the release of the Altair 8800, the company that made the Altair 8800 coined the term “personal computer.” Though it would be in 1976 that the first of the well-known apple computers were made by Steve Wozniak and then only a year later released, the Apple II was the most advanced PC to date. The pioneers in the Diffusion of Innovation Theory are described as the first to try these new inventions or come up with these ideas, and they are usually described as risk takers. The innovators make up 2.5% of the population. For the PC, the pioneers would be the inventors of the early forms of the PC, like Apple and Commodore, who were all the competitors in this field at the time.     The next group of people would be the early adopters, who are the opinion leaders of the group or trendsetters who are comfortable with new technologies or ideas. The early adopter makes up 13.5% of the population. The early adopters of the PC were described as college-educated workers that lived in metropolitan areas and whose jobs probably had to do with IT or computers in some way.

    The early majority is described as those who adopt these new technologies after it was been proven to work by others, and they make up 34% of the population. By the time 1982 rolled around, PC would be in more homes than ever. A magazine article from the year after estimated that 1 million PC were bought in 1982, in the U.S alone. Also in the 90s the iMac would be a be huge selling around 800,000 to people within the first five months. These seem to be two of the first big waves of PC buying in the U.S.

    The next group of people is those who are wary of change and only tend to adopt it after a majority of people have; this is the late majority. This would be anyone who got a PC past these two waves when it moved into the 2000s with the release of the Macbook Air in 2008 because this is passed those initial PCs.     The final group of people is the laggers, who are the hardest group to get to adopt new technology or idea; they tend to be very skeptical and unwilling to change. This group, for the PC, are those who still don’t have PCs, or if they do, they do not use them very frequently. I think this of people is very small because it's kind of hard not to use computers at all in this day in age, but there are definitely people out there that refuse to use the internet and PC by proxy.