Innovate or Die

The Diffusions of Innovations theory by Everett Rogers describes how information about a new innovation is communicated to others. Rogers also goes on to break down the timeline of when different users of the new innovation eventually pick it up (or don't). He categorized the users into five different segments (Robinson, 2009):

1. Innovators – the people who do the creating. At 2.5%, they are the smallest user segment in the group.

2. Early Adopters – the first people to try anything. They are a minority of users, with 13.5% of the population falling into this group.

3. Early Majority - the first large group of the population (34%) that will use the innovation if it is a success with the early adopters.

4. Late Majority – better late than never, this user segment is 34% of the population who come on board only after it looks like everyone else has.

5. Laggards – the group that will always say "no, thank you" to the innovation. 16% of the population falls into this segment (Robinson, 2009).

These segments align with the adoption of past innovations like the iPhone or in-progress innovations like electric cars. Although both these innovations are life-changing, their progressive roll-outs show they were/are not life-saving.

But what happens when a problem is critical, and the innovation is imperative? Would there be time to naturally go through all the stages so that a majority was finally using the innovation?

What happens when it’s "innovate or die"?

The Boll Weevil 
 
It was 1915 in Alabama, and a tiny bug was causing big problems for local farmers. The boll weevil, a beetle that feeds on cotton leaves and lays its eggs in the cotton buds, was working its way through Alabama’s cotton crop. Arriving around 1910, in only five short years the boll weevil had destroyed cotton harvests throughout the state. Since cotton was raised on land that wasn’t good for anything else and had the highest profit margin, farmers were reluctant to let go—additionally, the less cotton in the market, the higher the price. So the farmers grew more, which just fed and produced more boll weevils, and the situation continued to deteriorate (Boissoneault, 2017).

The whole agricultural economy of the South could have collapsed if it weren’t for the innovator George Washington Carver. In his research as a professor at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver identified the peanut (in addition to sweet potatoes and soybeans) as a viable alternative to cotton.

In 1916, Carver promoted peanuts as a cash crop through one of his many agricultural bulletins. Desperate, the farmers took his advice and switched from cotton to peanuts, going from slightly more than half a million acres of peanut cultivation in 1915 to more than four million acres in 1918 (Hutchins, n.d.).

The Southern agricultural economy was saved.

To bring this back to Diffusion of Innovation, if employing the user segments mentioned above, the innovation would have to have to accelerate through the stages quickly for a majority of users to not literally lose the farm. One of Roger's elements of the theory is time. Rogers wrote that “the innovation-decision period is the length of time required to pass through the innovation-decision process (Rogers, 21). 

Can the innovation-decision period be accelerated to the point where the innovation skips entire user groups? If early majority farmers had taken the usual time to watch for the success of early adopters, followed by the acceptance of the late majority, would the economy have survived? Or did the economy survive because everyone needed to become either the early adopters or the early majority of Carver’s innovation?

Regardless if it was a hyper-accelerated progression through the user segments, or if there was some kind of merging of the user groups, farmers all across the South chose the innovation of George Washington Carver over the death of their agricultural economy. 

References

Boissoneault, L. (May 2017). Why an Alabama Town Has a Monument Honoring the Most Destructive Pest in American History. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/agricultural-pest-honored-herald-prosperity-enterprise-alabama-180963506/

Hutchins, Z. (n.d.) George Washington Carver: Advocate for Southern Farmers. https://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/carver.html

Robinson, L. (January 2009). A Summary of Diffusion of Innovations.  http://www.enablingchange.com.au/Summary_Diffusion_Theory.pdf

Rogers, E. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. The Free Press. 


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