Abstract
This chapter is about how technologies, after they have been implemented in a product or service, are adopted by users and how they diffuse into society. Generally, once technologies have reached at least TRL 8, they move to TRL 9. TRL stands for Technology Readiness Level and this is a commonly used scale between 1 and 9 to track technologies as they gradually mature from a laboratory environment to deployment in the field. This chapter initially focuses on the initial diffusion of technologies (Rogers, Diffusion of innovations, The Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schusters Inc., 1962). However, technologies are also abandoned and replaced by other newer technologies over time. If this happens quickly or unexpectedly and affects a whole economic sector, we talk about technological “disruption.” A kind of paralysis by owners of incumbent technologies due to this phenomenon of technological disruption has been described as the “Innovator’s Dilemma” by Christensen (The innovator’s dilemma – when new technologies cause great firms to fail, Harvard Business Review Press, 1997). The adoption, rejection, diffusion, and eventual abandonment of technologies is a crucial phenomenon that needs to be understood in detail to do meaningful roadmapping.
When considering technology diffusion and disruption, such as the adoption of electric appliances like refrigerators instead of ice boxes (Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1994) or communications via the Internet instead of hand-written letters, we often forget that many “old” technologies don’t disappear completely but persist for decades (or even centuries) in niche applications. We still use ice boxes on camping trips, and some of us still write physical letters on paper (at least on special occasions). Also, there are those, because of geographical isolation, religious belief, or concerns for the environment, who choose not to adopt modern technologies at all.
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Notes
- 1.
The first edition appeared in 1962, while the fifth and latest edition was published in 2003.
- 2.
Some point out that even though Rogers is better known, that it is really Zvi Griliches, a Harvard economist who should deserve the credit for being the first to rigorously study technology adoption (1957).
- 3.
In the early 2000s, Diffusion of Innovations was the second most cited text in the social sciences.
- 4.
Epistemic uncertainty is that uncertainty where the information is unknown to the decision maker, but the facts are already established and knowable. This is in contrast to aleatoric uncertainty where the facts are not yet established and are subject to a random stochastic process that unfolds in the future.
- 5.
However, in a more recent article by Liebowitz and Margolis (1990), the claim of the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard over QWERTY has been severely challenged, and some would say debunked.
- 6.
Everett M. Rogers passed away on October 21, 2004, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
- 7.
And with the ongoing launch of new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations such as OneWeb, Starlink, Kuiper, and others, there will soon be 100% global coverage for mobile broadband internet access.
- 8.
In Northern Spain entire abandoned and vacant villages are up for sale: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/08/23/433228503/in-spain-entire-villages-are-up-for-sale-and-theyre-going-cheap
- 9.
- 10.
Utterback (1994) notes that a rapidly growing underlying market can “mask” an ongoing disruption because absolute sales numbers of the incumbent technology can continue to grow, even as the relative market share of the incumbent technology drops. This is especially true during a historical period where sales numbers, quarterly reporting, and industry-wide market surveys were scarce or wholly unknown.
- 11.
This is the first instance where we mention the concept of figure of merit (FOM)-based target setting for technologies. The artificial ice machine makers set themselves a target of $1/ton of ice produced in the 1880s, which was roughly a 20-fold improvement of what was possible in the late 1860s. This concept of technology target setting will feature prominently in Chap. 8 on Technology Roadmapping.
References
Christensen, Clayton M., “The Innovator’s Dilemma – When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, Harvard Business Review Press, 1997, ISBN: 978-1-63369-178-0
David PA. Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review. 1985 May 1;75(2):332–337.
Doufene, A., Siddiqi, A., & de Weck, O. (2019). Dynamics of technological change: nuclear energy and electric vehicles in France. International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 13(2), 154–180.
Griliches, Z. (1957). Hybrid corn: an exploration in the economics of technological change. Econometrica, 25(4), 501–522.
Liebowitz SJ, Margolis SE. The fable of the keys. The Journal of Law and Economics. 1990 Apr 1;33(1):1–25.
Rogers, Everett M., “Diffusion of Innovations”, First Edition, The Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schusters Inc., 1962, Fifth Edition, 2003, ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-2209-9
Utterback, James M., “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation”, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1994, ISBN 0-87584-342-5
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Appendix
Appendix
7.1.1 Matlab Code for Agent-Based Simulation of Technology Diffusion
% simple Rogers-type agent-based diffusion model N=10000 ; % population size a=zeros(N,1) ; % initially all are non-adopters T=100 ; % time periods C=1; % number of contacts per time period n=0.5+(1/6)*randn(N,1); % create Gaussian distribution of population [fa,ind]=min(n); a(ind)=1; % find and set initial adopter for t=1:T; % loop over all time periods inda=find(a); % find all adopters at this time step A(t)=length(inda); % record the number of adopters at time t for inda2=1:length(inda); % loop over all current adopters indr=randi(N,C,1); % create random contacts this time period for inda3=1:length(indr); % loop over all random contacts nr=rand(1); % generate uniform random decision variable if n(indr(inda3))<=nr && a(indr(inda3))==0; % test adopt a(indr(inda3))=1; % nr adopts end end end end
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de Weck, O.L. (2022). Technological Diffusion and Disruption. In: Technology Roadmapping and Development . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88346-1_7
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