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

[sols-light.livejournal.com]

Like some others, I'm on the edge of Early Adopter and Early Majority. I was using the Internet through gopher protocols back in the day, but still dislike Flash pages and the layout choices made by many sites, Facebook is a great candidate here due to its overworked and poor coding.

My adoption of technology depends on my affinity with it, as we discussed the other night, I have to be slightly compelled to become a Soap nerd to be a really early adopter, or even innovator, otherwise I'm somewhere in the early majority due to no real need to find out about a product. As Mum would say it's about needs, wants and passionate desires; If it falls into any of those categories I'll do the research and learn enough about the product, otherwise I'll look to other people with more of one of those categories for that product or service and ask them.