Rogers Activity- Diffusion Discussion
400words
This week will be working on Everett Rogers’ book Diffusion of Innovations, which presents a set of ideas attempting to present a fairly comprehensive explanation of how new ideas and technology are spread from those who already know and/or use the innovation. This book has been through five editions and has been a reference point for quite a few scholars. Rogers is not the only scholar to try to explain these phenomena, but his theories have been very influential and you will very likely find them useful.
As Rogers defines it in the chapter, diffusion is: “…the process by which (1) an innovation (2) is communicated through certain channels (3) over time (4) among the members of a social system.” (11) What Rogers is attempting to do is provide an explanation for differences between innovations on how they are taken up by a population. Even though the innovation may be the same, it is not necessarily adopted in the same ways, and many of these ideas are used to investigate how workplaces attempt to introduce (or suppress) new technologies and approaches.
This chapter is an overview of quite a few ideas, so we’re going to break them down into more accessible chunks. For exploration of the ideas from each of the four major components of Rogers’ definition. Here is the breakdown:
- Adoption/Adopter
- Technology Clusters
- Hardware/Software
- Relative Advantage
- Compatibility
- Complexity
- Trialability
- Observability
- Reinvention
- Mass Media / Marketing / Advertising
- Heterophily / Homophily
- The Innovation-Decision Process
- Adopter Categories
- Rate of Adoption
- System effects
- System norms
- Opinion Leaders and Change Agents
- Types of innovation decisions
- Contingent innovation decisions
- Consequences of innovations
what you need to do is look at relevant materials from the chapter and post a full response:
- Describe the idea from Rogers in your own words.
- Provide an example of that explanation in action by documenting it with regards to a different technology currently in the news.
part 2:
You’ll need to comment on at least four posts on other classmates’ Rogers topics