Roger Adoption Curve

This post was originally a forum post on "NUS - Organizing for IT Innovation 2013"

This curve is a general representation of consumer adoption of a new product, highlighting the different groups of people: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

The goal of every innovation is to reach critical mass. This curve, however, only illustrates the group of people. It does not paint a complete picture involving factors and time taken.

For most product, once it hits early majority, achieving complete market domination and market saturation is only a matter of time, especially for those products with a network effect of user growth.

Most innovations would be forced to adopt an incompatible business model to tide themselves through the period. Some would take seed funding. But whatever it was, all of them would want to accelerate through the first two phases to hit the third phase as fast as possible.

Everett Rogers (who popularized this theory) brought forth four factors in this adoption curve: Innovation, Communication channels, Time, Social system.

Since Time is the factor we want to accelerate, we need to look at ‘enhancing’ Innovation, Communication channels, and Social system.

The innovation must be properly positioned and marketed to the users. This is especially important if the innovation is a latecomer to a market, and is competing against other products. User perception of the product must not contain any ambiguity. Advantages and disadvantages should be clearly spelled out. Use cases must be realistic. This is important, as first impression is extremely important. Rather than sweet-coating a product launch, being honest might earn goodwill and a second look from the user in the future, rather than losing the user totally when he attempts to dig deeper (or worse, do not bother to find out more).

People would typically list the World Wide Web as the most prevalent communication channels and leave it as that. However, this is too broad, and is usually not the most effective. This follows the “If you build it they will come mindset”, and given the enormous information available, a favorable blog post or forum response would just as easily be buried. People usually listen to ‘sources of authority’, e.g. TV, magazine reviews, respectable and influential people. E.g. Lady Gaga was an early adopter of Twitter, and there is no doubt that whatever social network she was on, that network would have a sudden surge in user base.

Look for influential early adopters, and allow them to communicate downstream to their friends/followers of the new innovation. Even if the innovation is a new social network, take advantage of the mass user base of existing social networks to broadcast the existence.

I interpret the last factor, social systems, more of an understanding that an item that could be manipulated. For example, the target is an Asian market. Asians might be more receptive to TV/magazine reviews than an internet website review. Asians might also be more sensitive to innovation outlays than the product quality itself.

Understanding the social systems factor is crucial, IMO, to devising a strategy to tackle the Innovation and Communication channels factors, and thus accelerating the adoption rate of an innovation.