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.

In the past decade, we have seen an increasing importance for companies to improve their innovation capabilities, least they become irrelevant quickly. Many of these companies begin by looking towards their users for innovation. Their communication models are usually unidirectional, one to one in terms of proposing innovative feature requests. Faced with an overwhelming amount of feature requests, the company might take to tabulating the requests and scoring them in terms of demand. The more frequently a feature is requested, the higher score it will yield. Such a model yields limited results: there is a possibility that a commonly thought of feature request could be proposed by many users, but a truly innovative idea that will revolutionize the company might never see the light as not many users could have thought of it.