How Ideas Cross. Diffusion of innovation, and why better products still stall

In 1943 the sociologists Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross studied how Iowa farmers took up hybrid seed corn. It was clearly better. It still took years to spread, and farmers mostly switched after watching neighbours succeed.

Better was not enough. Seen was what mattered.

Everett Rogers built on studies like this in Diffusion of Innovations, first published in 1962. Adoption follows a bell curve: innovators, about 2.5 percent; early adopters, 13.5; early majority, 34; late majority, 34; laggards, 16.

He named five traits that speed adoption: relative advantage, compatibility with how people already live, low complexity, trialability, and observability. Note the last one. People adopt what they can watch others use.

In 1991 Geoffrey Moore argued the curve hides a gap. Early adopters buy a vision. The early majority buys a working solution with references. Many products die in between, loved by enthusiasts and ignored by everyone else.

I think of diffusion as a cultural process in a technical costume. Technologies travel along social ties, status and trust. That is why a tool can be ten times better and still stall, and why a few tastemakers can move a whole field.

If you build something new, the useful question is not “is it good?” It is “who will be seen using it, and who is watching them?”