3 Dimensions of Innovation Adoption
- Post by: Griggs Zollinger
- September 25, 2022
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We asked business innovation leaders about their biggest concerns and challenges. Innovation adoption was identified as one of the top challenges in the research.
Additionally, our study revealed that 44% of respondents experienced significant difficulty getting new products accepted. And they now are looking for human-based processes to overcome this barrier.
What is Innovation Adoption?
Innovation adoption is a concept coined by Everett Rogers in 1962. In short, it is the ability and ambition of people and organizations to embrace new things and ultimately transform their methods of working.
The benefits of adoption are often clear. But actually getting people to adopt a new method or technology remains a challenge. Essentially, how can leaders make new technologies and products easier to adopt? And what is the best way to address people’s resistance in order to drive innovation forward?
Three Dimensions of Innovation Adoption
Are your innovative solutions both compatible and application-specific?
There are entrenched technology companies offering horizontal or generic solutions – Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, etc. While most of them offer functional systems, many industries have very unique requirements. A meaningful innovation is a complete solution that show you understand the ins and outs of the customer’s business. And they are designed with a specific-type of user in mind. This approach is called application-specific.
Innovations that seamlessly integrate with the day-to-day workflow of specific end users, and are sold through a trusted vendor, are adopted much faster.
How will you demonstrate your commitment?
Competition is intensifying in every market sector and industry thanks to the plethora of no-code development tools and platforms. In order to truly stand out you must demonstrate your long-term commitment to the end user and their industry.
Due to extremely low barriers to entry, competitors will come and go. And only the long-term players will invest in new IP, establish partnerships and help develop industry standards in order to move the entire market segment forward.
These kinds of investments show the customer that you are seriously committed to their success and well-being. Become an industry insider and the adoption of your innovation will skyrocket.
How will you ensure end-user security and establish peer-to-peer support?
Lastly, don’t forget about the essential need for end users to feel safe and support one another. Without trust and the feeling of safety, there will be no adoption. This is often a huge and unexpected barrier to technology adoption. Customers don’t like to go it alone and they need to feel like an entire community is adopting the innovation along with them. This mean establishing references and communications channels so that customers and prospective customers can interact with each other.
Customers also fear that technology vendors will have access to their data and may expose their information to competitors or hackers. This is extremely important in today’s environment of escalating privacy violations and cyberattacks. You must build an ecosystem of trust and safety for your customer to maximize adoption of your new innovation.
Without trust and the feeling of safety, there will be no adoption. This is often a huge and unexpected barrier to technology adoption.
This article is part of Diffusion Research Institute’s ongoing research, called Creating Meaningful Innovation. To find out more about how to create meaningful innovations. Visit these websites: