Innovators

[morsla]

It's been a while since I posted in here... I've been a bit buried under PhD stuff lately, and have tried to avoid boring everyone by putting it into a separate blog at lineofthought.

I'm starting to work out what I'm studying, which is a good thing. The project has been slowly developing from "I'd like to see how small businesses are using the internet these days" to "how are small businesses promoting themselves online", to "so, how and why do people adopt innovative technologies?"

By extending the project into innovation (adoption, management, etc) it becomes much less of a marketing thing, as I'm really not a marketer. I am interested in learning about innovation, and how best to persuade people to adopt new things.

To take an oft-cited model, Rogers created five different categories: Innovators (first to adopt new things, risk-takers), Early Adoptors (high degree of opinion leadership amongst the other categories), Early Majority (self explanatory), Late Majority (prefers to wait for stable, safe technologies) and Laggards (aversion to change).



Or, if you'd prefer: Moore's variation


So, because I'm curious: which category do you generally consider yourself a part of, when it comes to using the internet? Assume that you're rating yourself from amongst whatever bit of society you most commonly interact with. If you have any other caveats, feel free to leave a comment :)

[Poll #1411938]

Comments

[fetnas.livejournal.com]

I think I'd have to put myself on the cusp of 'Early adopters' and 'Early majority' but then the place really depends on what the technology on offer is and and how much personal value I give it. For some forms of tech, such as MP3 players, I'd have to call myself a laggard mainly because I believe the MD player I have has a better sound. Also, the disposable nature of a lot of the current gadgets really rubs me up the wrong way!

Sorry, reading that back, it seems I'm ranting a bit, but I'm sure you know what I mean! ;-)

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Ranting is good :)

It's an interesting spot, between the early adopters and early majority. One of the theories about why it's hard to market products successfully to both groups is that they look for quite different things.

Early adopters are much like the Innovators: they want something different, to change the way a task is done, or to do something completely new.

On the other hand, the early majority want something the same as they already have: refining or streamlining an existing process, without having to radically change anything.

Innovations tend to be disruptive products, doing things in a very different way. If you market them as new and different, you may get the early adopters on board while scaring off the potential early majority... and not all technologies are successful enough to see all five categories of consumers.

I guess it's why innovators are essentially risk takers, and need the financial security to afford new toys that may not take off. Lots of things fail to attract the majority (and the sales revenue that brings), even if they're clearly 'better' than alternative technologies - and so the Innovators might find themselves left with a dead-end device that works really well, but becomes obsolete.