Everett Rogers adopter categories

Rogers specified five “adopter categories” based on their innovativeness: (1) innovators, (2) early adopters, (3) early majority, (4) late majority, and (5) laggards. Rogers distinguished three main types of innovative-decisions: (1) optional innovation-decisions, choices made by an individual independent of the decisions of other members of the system to adopt or reject an innovation; (2) collective innovation-decisions, choices made by consensus among the members of a system; and (3) authority innovation-decisions, choices made by relatively few individuals in a system who possess power, status, or technical expertise. A fourth category consists of a sequential combination of two or more of these types of innovation-decisions: Contingent innovation-decisions are choices to adopt or reject that are made only after a prior innovation-decision. Everett Rogers also defined five attributes of innovations: (1) relative advantage, (2) compatibility, (3) complexity, (4) trialability, and (5) observability. (Rogers, 1995) The five criteria that influence the adoption of innovations were further defined by Moore and Benbasat as: (1) Relative Advantage-the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than its precursor; (2) Compatibility-the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the existing values, needs and past experiences of potential adopters; (3) Complexity-the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being difficult to use; (4) Observability-the degree to which the results of an innovation are observable to others and; (5) Trialability-the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with before adoption. (Moore and Benbasat, 1989)

Technology innovation

Many companies fail to consider the adoption criteria for innovations in their technology insertion plans.