Lecture: Adoption Factors

Lecture Notes:  Technology Lifecycles & Diffusion

In this lecture, there was a great graphic illustrating how as an idea becomes more sophisticated, “invading” ideas come in.  These invading ideas are initially inferior to the performance of the now-established idea, but soon thereafter the performance improvements of the original idea begin to taper off while the invading idea is still going through its biggest improvement burst.  (Of course, the invading idea eventually follows the same curve, but the point is that the invading idea can end up with higher performance than the original.) 

Adoption Factors:

1.       Relative advantage (improvement over existing).

2.       Compatability  (easy to assimilate into life).

3.       Complexity (easy to use).

4.       Trialability (easy to experiment).

5.       Observability (visible among peers and personal networks).

 Application:

1.  Don't worry if the whole system works perfectly and better than established systems on day one.  It will improve and eventually overtake the others.

2.  (Idea from a previous lecture:)  Form partnerships with lots of other little startups doing something similar (i.e. offer to provide them a platform for their educational projects).

3.  Sometimes an idea will be disregarded by the big players because it underperforms on a specific task...but it may outperform on a secondary task that is also important to users.  I think we have a huge advantage in this area over other online platforms commonly in use for the K-12 market, since we'll allow people to create and modify lessons in the Open Curriculum Project.

4.  Compatability...nothing too exciting here, but it will work on any computer browser, tablet or smartphone.

5.  Complexity is going to be a big deal.  For example, you can create a lesson in EdX...but it'll take a long time just to figure out how to use it, and there are tons of options.  Cool options, but it's a bit overwhelming.  Ours is easy...if you can pop text into a spreadsheet and upload files (or use the page-by-page lesson uploader online) you're good to go.

6.  Trialability is going to give us a nice advantage.  Long before we're ready to launch the Complete Curriculum Project, we'll be running all kinds of deals for people to try out lessons in the Open Curriculum Project.  We'll have a small market from homeschoolers and give out a lot of free samples to classroom teachers but it's all to ramp up to large adoption once we launch the CCP.

7.  I like this "observability" feature.  I've jotted down some ideas in the past to leverage social networks to improve visibility, but this will need to become more of a focus.  I want to make it seamlessly easy for users to show others what they like about our platform.