Understanding Technology Adoption
Let's examine the technology adoption cycle.
We'll cover the following...
Technology adoption
Not everyone adopts technology at the same rate. The key to your effectiveness comes from understanding what stage a given technology is in, which stage you want to be at, and (optionally) how to move technologies to the next stage.
The Rogers curve
In 1957, Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal, and Everett M. Rogers first proposed a bell curve-like distribution of technology adoption, now known as the Rogers curve:
This gave a simple visualization to the intuitive idea that technology comes to life by diffusing from a core set of innovators, has crucial use-cases proven out by early adopters, then put into widespread use by the optimistic early majority and conservative late majority, followed by reluctant laggards.
These stages do not just reflect the personality of people adopting a static technology - they also match with the technology itself improving and maturing over time. For example, you might expect technology at the early adopter stage to be full of bugs and not having a clear killer ...