Diffusion of Innovations

Diffusion of innovations is a theory that explains how, why and at what rate new ideas, practices and technologies spread through a population, developed and popularized by the communication scholar Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers defined diffusion as the process by which an innovation is communicated over time through particular channels among the members of a social system, and identified five main elements shaping how an innovation spreads: the innovation itself, the adopters, the communication channels used, the passage of time and the social system within which diffusion occurs. He classified adopters into five categories ordered by how quickly they take up a new idea, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards, with an individual's place in this sequence reflecting their innovativeness, the degree to which they adopt new ideas relatively earlier than others in the same system. Rogers also identified perceived characteristics of an innovation that affect how quickly it is adopted, including its relative advantage over what it replaces, its compatibility with existing values and experiences, its complexity, how easily it can be tried on a limited basis, and how observable its results are to others. In education, diffusion of innovations theory has been widely used to study and plan the spread of new teaching methods, curricula and educational technologies through schools and school systems, since an innovation must move beyond a narrow base of early-adopting teachers to reach the wider population of educators before it becomes self-sustaining.