Technology Adoption Lifecycle - Adaptations of The Model

Adaptations of The Model

The model has spawned a range of adaptations that extend the concept or apply it to specific domains of interest.

In this book, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore proposes a variation of the original lifecycle. He suggests that for discontinuous or disruptive innovations, there is a gap or chasm between the first two adopter groups (innovators/early adopters), and the early majority.

In Educational technology, Lindy McKeown has provided a similar model (a pencil metaphor) describing the ICT uptake in education. In medical sociology, Carl May has proposed Normalization Process Theory that shows how technologies become embedded and integrated in health care and other kinds of organisation.

Wenger, White and Smith, in their book Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities, talk of technology stewards: people with sufficient understanding of the technology available and the technological needs of a community to steward the community through the technology adoption process.

Rayna and Striukova (2009) propose that the choice of initial market segment has crucial importance for crossing the chasm, as adoption in this segment can lead to a cascade of adoption in the other segments. This initial market segment has, at the same time, to contain a large proportion of visionaries, to be small enough for adoption to be observed from within the segment and from other segment and be sufficiently connected with other segments. If this is the case, the adoption in the first segment will progressively cascade into the adjacent segments, thereby triggering the adoption by the mass-market.