Behavioral science · framework
Diffusion of innovations
Everett Rogers, 1962
Rogers gathered decades of studies — hybrid corn, new drugs, new tools — and found a recurring shape to how a new thing moves through a population: a few innovators first, then early adopters, then the early and late majorities, and finally the laggards. The curve is so regular it became a vocabulary, a way of asking not whether an idea will spread but who carries it at each stage and what slows it.
Working definition
A model of how, why, and at what rate innovations propagate via communication channels over time within a social system.
Where Vela uses this
Diffusion of innovations is the classic backdrop against which complex contagion sharpens its claim, and Vela includes it as the shared language adoption conversations still run on. It is the most cuttable of the adoption set for the corpus's core consumers, included because the books already sit in the library and the adoption thesis cites it. Pairs with complex contagion and crossing the chasm.
Origin & lineage
Ryan & Gross's hybrid-corn study (1943) → Rogers's *Diffusion of Innovations* (1962, five editions) → marketing, public health, and technology-adoption practice.
Where it shows up in Vela
Magazine
Related concepts
- Crossing the chasm
Extended by — Moore's marketing extension of the adopter sequence.
- Complex contagion
Critiqued by — Centola argues the simple model misses reinforcement effects.
Scholars
Honest framing
The adopter categories are descriptive labels, easy to apply after the fact and harder to use predictively, and the model can underplay why diffusion fails. Vela treats the curve as a shared vocabulary, not a law.