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)