ABSTRACT
In the modern technological environment, the links between military and civilian or commercial categories of technological innovation are undoubtedly strong and growing. There are two prerequisites critical to empirical research on the diffusion of innovations. The first is a clear understanding of the concept of an "innovation". The second is a meaningful scheme for classifying innovations and tracking their spread throughout the diffusion medium. This chapter addresses the first of these issues by defining exactly what is mean by military technological innovation (MTI). It addresses the second by generating a scheme for categorizing individual MTIs that is both theoretically and logically sound and can be employed operationally to conduct empirical research. The chapter explains how theoretical, empirical, and data constraints define the time frame and adopter population of this study and how specific MTIs were selected for analysis. Many studies deal with innovation diffusion over short periods of time through large, homogenous populations of individual human beings.
