Diffusion of Innovation
Diffusion of innovation is a very important process that for the most part goes unnoticed by the average consumer. Many of us don’t realize the activities and operations that took place for products in our own household to get to where they are. Diffusion of innovation can be seen all around us in real time, but how exactly do innovators disperse their new ideas and products to get to us?
To start us off we must answer what are the attributes that make innovations superior. To summarize, there are five main attributes that make a product greater than the last. These attributes include relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Improving in anyone of these aspects can create a product to be superior than what it originally was (innovation) but it doesn’t explain to how these new ideas and products spread to us.
There are five stages of the rate of adoption of innovations are picked up in society known as the corresponding bell-shaped adopters curve. The five stages consist of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. It is interesting looking back on products you have recently bought and depicting what stage of adopters you classify yourself in. As described in Oklahoma University webpage, OU.edu, Innovators are people who want to be the first to try the innovation. These people are very willing to take risks, and are often the first to develop new ideas. Early Adopters are people who represented as opinion leaders. They are aware of the need to change and so are very comfortable adopting new ideas. Early Majority people are rarely leaders, but they do adopt new ideas before the average person. That said, they typically need to see evidence that the innovation works before they are willing to adopt it. Late Majority people are skeptical of change, and will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority. Last but not least are Laggards. These people are bound by tradition and very conservative. They are very skeptical of change and are the hardest group to bring on board.
Now that we have an understanding of how products can be innovated and how the ideas are picked up throughout cultures and societies, lets take a look into a fairly recent form of innovation that making a big splash in the automobile industry. Tesla has been around for over 15 years but only in recent years has the company found their niche in the auto world. CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, said the purpose of Tesla is to “to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar electric economy.” To me this product is somewhere in between the early adopters and early majority phase due to the fact that majority of cars bought today are not electric, nor Tesla but the work Tesla has done is forever changing the industry. In the next 5 years this product will be fully in the early majority and rapidly growing into the late majority as more and more people become environmentally conscious and decide to make the change to electric vehicles. In the last couple years we can see an immense amount of technology and innovators uprising in this field and attempt to take away some market share from Tesla. Companies here in america include Fisker, Bollinger, Lucid Motors, and even Hummer is back introducing their new EV trucks. These are just some of the new innovators to the market. While these companies are growing fast, perhaps Tesla’s biggest competitor is in the foreign market of China. China has the largest population in the world and just passed new policies this year to manufacture more EV and introduce charging stations all over the country to keep up with the growing market and reduce their carbon footprint. China’s largest producers of EV’s are NIO and Xpeng. Just in recent months these companies stock market price has risen over at an incredible rate. It will be interesting to the the phase changes of the adoption curve as the world pushes to be more environment friendly.
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