ABSTRACT
Research on diffusion of innovations, based on thousands of studies about how inventions and ideas have spread, was drawn together in the early 1960s by Everett Rogers in his classic, Diffusion of Innovations (1963). This book has gone through several subsequent editions in the last three decades. Insights into diffusion of innovations processes affect how products are marketed and how political campaigns are run. Such insights also influence strategies used on a 'micro' level to encourage changes to take hold in one's workplace, or to decipher how they do not take hold. Some see the study of the diffusion of innovations as the precursor to contemporary efforts in the field of organizational learning, viewing diffusion as a collective learning process (for a background on organizational learning, see Rifkin and Fulop, 1997).
