Success of Innovation & Role of Early Adopters

Have you heard of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations? If not, here it is:

What does Diffusion of Innovation depict : If you introduce a concept or a product to public/market, it gets accepted/used/dispersed through different society/cultures at different pace by different category of users.

This principle is applicable to majority of technological products, new processes/concepts albeit with variations in terms of: duration of acceptance & percentage of users in each category.

What made me think of this theory? It is the way Agile Methodology of project management is being adopted in large part of industries (IT – considerably) and for last few years, we have seen so many companies trying their own flavours of agile methodology. I remember, back in early 2000: when Agile Project Management methodology was fairly new, as it was discussed in the context of Software development. Extreme Programming (XP) was the only variation of agile project management, I had heard of. Significant number of people I was talking to, were not even aware of it; those who had heard of, many were resisting the concept.

Okay, I am not proposing that agile is the one best fit for all of your project management practices/needs. Of course not! Though it is apparent that the Early Majority & Late Majority are the ones who define whether a given concept is widely accepted or not; it is ‘Innovators & Early Adopters’ who decides the basis for acceptance & the pace depends on how these two categories of users ‘Innovator & Early Adopters’ formulate their opinion, evangelize and spread the word.

I cannot resist but to draw an analogy with a video – rather a funny video, which is now well known for its ‘Leadership Lessons’. The video is about the lone dancer who gets a company of a fellow (first follower); both of them, in turn are joined by one more fellow dancer (second follower). As this trio is seen dancing by the mob around them, people from the mob starts participating in groups and this participation from group of people becomes a community movement.

1.The lone dancer is a leader, indeed. It takes guts to stand out from the crowd and be the initiator, since at the first sight what s/he does may look stupid/silly/against-the-flow. Point for us to draw here is, how the initiator should make it simple & easy for others to get along with him/her (if not ‘following’ him).

2.The role of first follower is critical – s/he has guts to accompany a lone dancer. To the mob, s/he shows, how to participate. You can see that the lone dancer acknowledge him & treat him in equality. This encourages the first follower to influence his circles. The lone dance, thus inspire him to invite his friends too.

3.The second fellow who joins above two, reinforce the presumption that the idea is great to follow. He sets a clear path (as an opinion leader) for the early adopters in the mob to start following the trio. As early adopters joins in, it becomes a custom/social status to join the movement hence the majority of the public around them joins in. Still you will find set of people who are just watching the dancing mob & reluctant to join them. In this case, they can be considered as laggard.

4.In some discussion with reference to this video, it has been argued whether the first follower is the most important or second follower is the most important for the success of the movement. In my opinion, the trio – [Initiator (Guy #1), the first follower (Guy #2) and the second follower (Guy #3)] itself is the most important part of the movement. The trio represent a symbol of leadership for rest of the mob.

Similarly, while managing a project, you may have innovative ideas to get the things done; you may have to establish a new process; enable a change. You will realize the importance of innovator & early adopter in such case. You have an advantage if you have a choice to invite innovators & early adopters. As they are going to spread the words, build an opinion of new process/change such as ‘Life is great as I am working with new process, why don’t you join in?’, you will have to build good relationship with them, treat them equally/carefully & provide incentive to join early !

About Zilicus

Zilicus offers the project portfolio management tool ZilicusPM, with robust project management tools capabilities and easy ways to track project management KPI,