Concept
The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called "innovators", followed by "early adopters". Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "Laggards" or "phobics." For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service. The demographic and psychological (or "psychographic") profiles of each adoption group were originally specified by agricultural researchers in 1956: innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders, less prosperous early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbors late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated The model has subsequently been adapted for many areas of technology adoption in the late 20th century, for example in the spread of policy innovations among U.S. states. The model has spawned a range of adaptations that extend the concept or apply it to specific domains of interest. In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore proposes a variation of the original lifecycle. He suggests that for discontinuous innovations, which may result in a Foster disruption based on an s-curve, there is a gap or chasm between the first two adopter groups (innovators/early adopters), and the vertical markets. Disruption as it is used today are of the Clayton M.
