224 Diffusion of Innovations
you like to be the change agent who is responsible for persuading In- dians to eat with
their left hands? Many change agents face equally difficult assignments in promoting
innovations that run counter to strongly held values.
Compatibility with Previously Introduced Ideas
An innovation may be compatible not only with deeply imbedded cultural values
but also with previously adopted ideas. Compatibility of an innovation with a
preceding idea can either speed up or retard its rate of adoption. Old ideas are the main
tools with which new ideas are assessed. One cannot deal with an innovation except
on the basis of the familiar and the old fashioned. Previous practice is a familiar stan-
dard against which the innovation can be interpreted, thus decreasing uncertainty.
Examples of the use of past experience to judge new ideas come from a diffusion
study in a Colombian peasant community (Fals Borda, 1960). At first, farmers
applied chemical fertilizers on top of their potato seed (as they had done with cattle
manure), thereby damaging their seed and causing a negative evaluation of the
innova- tion. Other peasants excessively sprayed their potatoes with insec- ticides,
transferring to the new idea their old methods of watering their plants.
Hawley (1946) sought to determine why the Roman Catholic religion, as
offered by proselytizing Spanish priests, was readily ac- cepted by Eastern Pueblo
Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, whereas the Western Pueblos, "after a brief
taste of Catholicism, re- jected it forcefully, killed the priests, burned the missions,
and even annihilated the village of Awatobi when its inhabitants showed a tendency
to accept the acculturation so ardently proffered." Hawley concluded that the
Eastern Pueblos, whose family structure was heavily patrilineal and father
oriented, were attracted by a new religion in which the deity was a male figure.
Catholicism, however, was incompatible with the mother-centered beliefs of the
Western Pueblos. Perhaps if the change agents had been able to emphasize the female-
image aspect of Catholicism (the Virgin Mary), they would have achieved greater
success among the Western Pueblo tribes.
The rate of adoption of a new idea is affected by the old idea that it supersedes.
Obviously, however, if a new idea were completely con-
226 Diffusion of Innovations
as meeting the needs of the client system. When felt needs are met, a faster
rate of adoption usually occurs.
Attributes of Innovations and Their Rate of Adoption 225
gruent with existing practice, there would be no innovation, at least in the
mind of the potential adopters.* In other words, the more com- patible an
innovation is, the less of a change it represents. How useful, then, is the
introduction of a very highly compatible innovation? Quite useful,
perhaps, if the compatible innovation is seen as the first step in a series of
innovations that are to be introduced sequentially. The compatible innovation
paves the way for later, less compatible in-
novations.
A negative experience with one innovation can damn the adoption
of future innovations. Such innovation negativism (Arensberg and Niehoff,
1964) is an undesirable aspect of compatibility. Innovation negativism is the
degree to which an innovation's failure conditions a potential adopter to
reject future innovations. When one idea fails,
potential adopters are conditioned to view all future innovations with
apprehension.
Compatibility with Needs
One indication of the compatibility of an innovation is the degree to which it
meets a need felt by the clients. Change agents seek to deter- mine the needs
of their clients, and then recommend innovations to fulfill these needs. The
difficulty often lies in how to feel felt needs; change agents must have a
high degree of empathy and rapport with their clients in order to assess their
needs accurately. Informal probing in interpersonal contacts with individual
clients, client advisory com- mittees to change agencies, and surveys are
sometimes used to deter- mine needs for innovations.
Clients may not recognize that they have needs for an innovation until
they are aware of the new idea or of its consequences. In these cases, change
agents may seek to generate needs among their clients but this must be done
carefully or else the felt needs upon which diffu- sion campaigns are based
may be only a reflection of the change agent's needs, rather than those of
his clients. Therefore, one dimen- sion of compatibility is the degree to
which an innovation is perceived
*Just such a case is reported by Hahn (1974), who found that the U.S. social studies teachers
he studied rejected educational innovations that were too similar to existing practices. If an
innovation is too similar, it appears to offer no advantage over the status quo.
Compatibility and Rate of Adoption
The examples just reviewed, and other evidence, support Generaliza- tion
6-2: The compatibility of an innovation, as perceived by
members of a social system, is positively related to its rate of adop- tion.
Statistical analyses of this proposition, which control the effects of other
attributes of innovations (Table 6-1), show compatibility to be of relatively
less importance in predicting rate of adoption than other attributes, such as
relative advantage. This result may be in part an artifact of difficulties in
measuring perceived compatibility. In most of the studies shown in Table 6-
1, compatibility was found to be positively related to rate of adoption, even
though the correlation was often not significant when the effects of other
attributes were removed statistically.
Technology Clusters
Innovations often are not viewed singularly by individuals. They may be
perceived as an interrelated bundle of new ideas. The adoption of one new
idea may trigger the adoption of several others.
A technology cluster consists of one or more distinguishable
elements of technology that are perceived as being closely interrelated. The
boundaries around any given innovation are often not very clear- cut or
distinct. In the minds of potential adopters, one innovation may be perceived
as closely related to another new idea. If this is the case, a change agency
might find it useful to promote a cluster or package of innovations to
clients, rather than to treat each new idea separately.
For instance, in India and other developing nations, a package of
agricultural innovations, usually including improved crop varieties,
fertilizer, and other agricultural chemicals, is recommended in toto to
farmers. Experience indicates that villagers adopt the package more easily
and rapidly than they would adopt if each of the innovations had been
diffused individually. More importantly, by adopting all at once, farmers
get the total yield effects of all the innovations, plus the interaction effects
of each practice on the others.
Unfortunately, the package approach has little empirical basis in
Attributes of Innovations and Their Rate of Adoption
228
Diffusion of Innovations
prior to its release. On the other hand, public change agencies gener- ally
do not realize the importance of what an innovation is called.
Attributes of Innovations and Their Rate of Adoption 227
diffusion research even though it may seem to make sense intuitively.
Naturally, the packaging should be based on the user's perceptions of the
innovations, but this has not been done. Factor analysis of the in-
tercorrelations among adopters' time of adoption (or their percep- tions) of
a series of innovations can be used to determine which of the innovations
cluster together, as Crouch (1981) demonstrated for
Australian sheep farmers.
One of the few investigations of a complex of new ideas is Silver-
man and Bailey's (1961) analysis of the adoption of three corn-
growing innovations by 107 Mississippi farmers. The three ideas
(fertilization, hybrid-seed, and thicker planting) were functionally in-
terrelated in such a way that adoption of the latter innovation without
concurrent use of the other two ideas resulted in lower corn yields than if
none of the ideas was used. Most farmers either adopted all three of the
ideas or none of them, but 8 percent used unsuccessful combina- tions.
Silverman and Bailey suggest the need for change agents to show farmers
the interrelationships among the three ideas in the corn- growing complex.
Some merchandisers offer tie-in sales, a technique that recognizes
the high degree of compatibility among several new products. A new clothes
washer may be offered to housewives as a package deal along with a dryer.
Some marketing schemes ''hook on'' an unwanted prod- uct to a compatible
innovation that possesses a high degree of relative advantage.
There is need to analyze complexes of innovations in future
research, to study new ideas in an evolutionary sequence, and to deter- mine
the degree of compatibility perceived by individuals among in- terrelated
ideas. We would then have a sounder basis for the assem- bling of
innovations in easier-to-adopt packages.
Naming an Innovation
The name given to an innovation often affects its compatibility, and
therefore its rate of adoption. Not enough attention has been paid to what
innovations are called by potential adopters, and as a result many serious
mistakes have been made. For instance, a major U.S. soap company
introduced its trademarked product "Cue" into French-speaking nations,
where the word has an obscene connota- tion. Such egregious errors have
shown commercial companies the im- portance of market research to pretest
the name for a new product
229
The perception of an innovation is colored by the word-symbols used to
refer to it. The selection of an innovation's name is a delicate and important
 matter. Words are the thought units that structure our perceptions. And of
course it is the potential adopters' perceptions of an innovation's name that
affect its rate of adoption. Sometimes a medical or a chemical name is used
for an innovation that comes from
medical or chemical research and development; unfortunately, such names
are not very meaningful to potential adopters (unless they are physicians or
chemists). Examples are "2,4-D weed spray," "IR-20 rice variety," and
"intrauterine device," terms that were confusing and misunderstood by
farmers or family planning adopters. A new in- trauterine device, the
"copper-T," was introduced in South Korea without careful consideration
of an appropriate Korean name. The letter "T" does not exist in the
Korean alphabet, and copper is con- sidered a very base metal and has a
very unfavorable perception. Thus, one could hardly have chosen a worse
name (Harding et al,
1973).
In contrast, the word "Nirodh" was carefully chosen in India in
1970 as the most appropriate term for condoms. Prior to this time,
condoms had a very negative perception as a contraceptive method; they
were thought of mainly as a means of preventing venereal
disease. When the government of India decided to promote condoms
as a contraceptive method, they pretested a variety of terms.
"Nirodh," a Sanskritic word meaning "protection," was selected,
and then promoted in a huge advertising campaign to the intended au- dience
(Rogers, 1973, p. 237). The result was a sharp increase in the rate of
adoption of "Nirodhs."*
We recommend such a receiver-oriented, empirical approach to
naming an innovation, so that a word-symbol that has the desired
meaning to the audience is chosen.
Positioning an Innovation
A basic assumption of positioning research is that an individual will behave
toward a new idea in a manner that is similar to the way he or
*In part, because use of the word "Nirodh" helped overcome the tabooness of con- doms.
Taboo communication is a type of message transfer in which the messages are perceived as
extremely private and personal in nature because they deal with pro-_ scribed behavior.
230
Diffusion of Innovations
perceptions of potential adopters) relative (1) to previous ideas, and (2) to
the characteristics of the new idea that make it similar to, and different
from, existing ideas. The positioning approach views an in- novation's
perceived characteristics (at least some of them) as changeable.
she behaves toward other ideas that the individual perceives as similar to the
new idea. For instance, consider a category of existing products consisting of
products A, B, and C. If a new product, X, is introduced to the audience for
these products, and if they perceive X as similar to B, but unlike A and C,
then consumers who bought B will be just as likely to buy X as B. If other
factors (like price) are equal, X should at- tain about one-half of the former
B consumers, but the introduction of X should not affect the sales of
products A and C. Further, if we can learn why consumers perceive B and
X as similar, but different from A and C, X can be positioned (through its
name, color, packag- ing, taste, and the like) so as to maximize its distance
from A, B, and C in the minds of consumers, and thus to gain a unique niche
for the new
idea.
Obviously, the positioning of an innovation rests on accurately
measuring its compatibility with previous ideas.
Research to position new products is often conducted by market
researchers, and many of the methods for positioning an innovation have
been developed by commercial researchers. But these positioning techniques
can be used to ease the introduction of any type of innova- tion. For
instance, Harding et al (1973, p. 21) used positioning methods to
introduce the copper-T, a new intrauterine device in Korea. First, they
asked a small sample of potential adopters to help identify twenty-nine
perceived attributes of eighteen contraceptive methods in an open-ended,
unstructured approach. Then another sample of Korean respondents were
asked to rate each of the eighteen family planning methods (including the
copper-T, the only new method) on these thirty-nine attributes (which
included numerous subdimensions of the five main attributes discussed in
this chapter). The result was a series of recommendations about which
attributes of the copper-T should be stressed in its diffusion campaign, in
order to maximize its rate of adoption. For instance, Harding et al (1973, p.
10) recommended stressing the copper-T's long lifetime, its reliability (in
preventing unwanted pregnancies), its lack of interference with sexual life,
and its newness. These researchers also recommended a change in the physical
nature of the copper-T: "Certain features of the copper - T, such as the
string [a plastic thread used to remove the intrauterine device], perhaps
should be altered since the string is associated with causing bacteria to enter
the womb and with causing an inflammation of the womb" (Harding et al,
1973, p. 11).
Positioning research, thus, can help identify an ideal niche for an
innovation to fill relative to existing ideas in the same field. This ideal niche
is determined on the basis of the new idea's position (in the
Positioning research puts the diffusion researcher in the role of
designer (or at least co-designer) of innovations.
One special kind of positioning research is that conducted in order to
provide guidance to R&D activities on what kind of innovations to produce.
The logic here is that if innovations of type X will not be ac- cepted by
potential adopters but innovations of type Y will be ac- cepted, R&D
 workers should concentrate their efforts to develop type Y innovations. An
example of this approach is provided by the World Health Organization's
(WHO) Human Reproduction Unit in Geneva, which directs a worldwide
program of research on contraceptives for use in developing nations. In the
past, most contraceptive methods have faced difficult problems of
acceptability (Rogers, 1973). So WHO conducts diffusion studies of
what types of contraceptives would be accepted if they were available.
These recommendations are then used to give directions to WHO biomedical
researchers to create a new contraceptive with an "ideal" set of attributes.
For example, diffusion studies on contraceptives show that men and
women in developing nations are very adverse to using a birth control
method that requires manipulation of human genitals. Unfor- tunately, the
main contraceptives promoted by government family planning programs
in developing nations in the 1960s and 1970s re- quired genital
manipulation: the intrauterine device, condoms, and the diaphragm, for
instance. Perhaps the lack of compatibility of these contraceptive methods
with the value against genital handling is one reason why their rate of
adoption has been generally discourag- ing. Future WHO biomedical
research has been directed, in part, toward developing contraceptives
that do not require genital han- dling, for example, an injectable
contraceptive (Rogers and Pareek,
1982).
Complexity
Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as
relatively difficult to understand and use. Any new idea may be
232
Diffusion of Innovations
Observability
Attributes of Innovations and Their Rate of Adoption 231
classified on the complexity-simplicity continuum. Some innovations are
clear in their meaning to potential adopters while others are not. Although
the research evidence is far from conclusive, we suggest Generalization 6-
3: The complexity of an innovation, as perceived by members of a social
system, is negatively related to its rate of adop-
tion.
Kivlin (1960) found that the complexity of farm innovations was
more highly related (in a negative direction) to their rate of adoption than
any other characteristic of the innovations except relative advan-
tage. Similar results were reported by Singh (1966) in Canada and by
Petrini (1966) in Sweden (Table 6-1).
Graham (1956) sought to determine why canasta and television
diffused at different adoption rates among the upper and lower
socioeconomic classes. One reason was the difference in complexity of the two
ideas. Canasta had to be learned through detailed personal ex- planation
from other card players. Its procedures were complex and difficult to
master. Television, however, appeared to be a relatively simple idea that
required only the ability to turn a knob.
Trialability
Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with
on a limited basis. New ideas that can be tried on the installment plan will
generally be adopted more rapidly than innovations that are not divisible.
An innovation that is trialable is less uncertain for the adopter. Some
innovations are more difficult to divide for trial than others. In spite of the
lack of strong evidence, we suggest Generaliza- tion 6-4: The trialability of
an innovation, as perceived by members of a social system, is positively
related to its rate of adoption. Studies by Fliegel and Kivlin (1966a), Singh
(1966), and Fliegel et al (1968) sup- port this statement (Table 6-1).
Relatively earlier adopters perceive trialability as more important
than do later adopters (Gross, 1942; Ryan, 1948). Laggards move
from initial trial to full-scale use more rapidly than do innovators and early
adopters. The more innovative individuals have no precedent to follow
when they adopt, while the later adopters are surrounded by peers who
have already adopted the innovation. These peers may act as a psychological
or vicarious trial for the later adopters, and hence, the actual trial of a new
idea is of less significance for them.
Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are
visible to others. The results of some ideas are easily observed and
communicated to others, whereas some innovations are difficult to
describe to others. We suggest Generalization 6-5: The observability of an
innovation, as perceived by members of a social system, is positively
related to its rate of adoption.
Most of the innovations studied in diffusion research are
technological ideas. A technology is a design for instrumental action that
reduces the uncertainty in the cause-effect relationships involved in
achieving a desired outcome. A technology has two components: (1) a
hardware aspect that consists of the tool that embodies, the technology as
material or physical objects, and (2) a software aspect that consists of the
information base for the tool. An example, cited in Chapter 1, is computer
hardware (the equipment) and software (the computer programs).
Usually the software component of a
technological innovation is not so apparent to observation, so innova- tions
in which the software aspect is dominant possess less observabil- ity, and
usually have relatively slower rates of adoption.
Explaining Rate of Adoption
Rate of adoption is the relative speed with which an innovation is
adopted by members of a social system. It is generally measured as the
number of individuals who adopt a new idea in a specified period. So rate of
adoption is a numerical indicant of the steepness of the adop- tion curve for
an innovation.
We showed previously in this chapter that one important type of
variable in explaining the rate of adoption of an innovation is its
perceived attributes. Table 6-1 indicated that 49 to 87 percent of the
variance in rate of adoption is explained by the five attributes (relative
advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability). In
addition to these perceived attributes of an innovation, such other variables
as (1) the type of innovation-decision, (2) the nature of com- munication
channels diffusing the innovation at various stages in the innovation-decision
process, (3) the nature of the social system, and (4) the extent of change
agents' promotion efforts in diffusing the in- novation, affect an
innovation's rate of adoption (Figure 6-1).
Attributes of Innovations and Their Rate of Adoption 233
III. Communication Channels (e.g., mass media or
interpersonal)
IV. Nature of the Social System
(e.g., its norms, degree of interconnectedness, etc
V. Extent of Change Agents' Promotio n Efforts
Figure 6-1. A paradigm of variables determining the rate of adoption of
innovations.
The type of innovation-decision is related to an innovation's rate of
adoption. We generally expect that innovations requiring an individual-
optional innovation-decision will be adopted more rapidly than when an
innovation is adopted by an organization (Chapter 10). The more persons
involved in making an innovation-decision, the slower the rate of
adoption. If so, one route to speeding the rate of adoption is to attempt to
alter, the unit of decision so that fewer in- dividuals are involved. For
instance, it has been found in the United States that when the decision to
adopt fluoridation of municipal water supplies is made by a mayor or city
manager, the rate of adoption is quicker than when the decision is made
collectively by a public referendum.
The communication channels used to diffuse an innovation also
may have an influence on the innovation's rate of adoption (Figure
6-1). For example, if interpersonal channels must be used to create
awareness-knowledge, as frequently occurs among later adopters, the rate of
adoption will be slowed.
The relationship between communication channels and rate of
adoption are even more complicated than Figure 6-1 suggests. The at-
tributes of the innovation and the communication channels probably
234 Diffusion of Innovations

interact to yield a slower or faster rate of adoption. For example, Petrini et al (1968)
found differences in communication-channel use on the basis of the perceived
complexity of innovations among Swedish farmers. Mass media channels, such as
agricultural maga- zines, were satisfactory for less complex innovations, but interper- sonal
contact with extension change agents was more important for innovations that were
perceived by farmers as more complex. And if an inappropriate channel was used, such as
mass media channels, for complex ideas, a slower rate of adoption resulted.
There is also a further consideration (see Figure 6-1): the nature of the social system.
Especially important are the norms of the system and the degree to which communication
network structure displays a high degree of interconnectedness, as we discuss in the following
sec- tion on the diffusion effect.
Last, as suggested by Figure 6-1, an innovation's rate of adoption is affected by the
extent of change agents' promotion efforts. The relationship between rate of adoption and
change agents' efforts, however, is not usually direct and linear. There is a greater pay-
off from a given amount of change agent activity at certain stages in an in- novation's
diffusion. Stone (1952) and Petrini (1966) show that the greatest response to change agent
effort occurs when opinion leaders are adopting, which usually occurs somewhere between 3
and 16 per- cent adoption in most systems.
As yet, there has been very little diffusion research designed to determine the relative
contribution of each of the five types of variables (shown in Figure 6-1).