Framework library · Technology management
Technology adoption life cycle
Buyers take up a new technology in a sequence: a few innovators, then visionary early adopters, then the pragmatic early majority, the conservative late majority and the laggards. Each group buys for different reasons and trusts different evidence, and the gap between visionaries and pragmatists is wide enough that many products stall in it. The way across is to win one narrow mainstream segment completely before moving to the next.
Use it when
- A new product has early customers who bought it as a project, and sales to ordinary buyers are stalling.
- You are choosing which segment to build a packaged offer for, and every segment looks attractive on paper.
- Forecasts assume take-up will keep growing at the early rate, and you need to test whether the next buyers will behave like the first.
- A board or investor asks why a product with satisfied reference customers is not yet selling at scale.
Avoid it when
- The product improves something buyers already use without asking them to change how they work. Moore's chasm does not apply. Choose segments with segmentation, targeting and positioning (the STP framework) and sell on price and performance.
- You need to size the market. The categories describe how buyers behave, not how many there are. Size the mainstream segments with TAM, SAM and SOM.
- You have no customers and no evidence of how buyers decide. Placing segments on the curve is then guesswork. Interview buyers first, using jobs to be done.
How to run it
List buyer segments narrowly
A segment is a group of buyers who use the product for the same purpose and talk to each other: "mid-size container terminals in northern Europe", not "logistics". References travel inside narrow segments.
Place each segment by how it buys
Innovators buy technology for its own sake. Early adopters are visionaries who buy a breakthrough and accept a custom project. The early majority are pragmatists who buy a proven solution their peers already use. The late majority buy once it is standard, and laggards when they must.
Count where your customers are today
If every customer is an innovator or an early adopter, their success stories will not persuade pragmatists, who want references from buyers like themselves.
Choose one mainstream segment to win
Pick the early majority segment with the most pressing problem that you can solve completely, and where a few wins will be talked about. Moore calls it the beachhead.
Build the whole product for that segment
Everything the buyer needs to get the result: the product, integration, services, partners and support. Pragmatists buy the whole product or nothing.
Plan the next segment before you arrive
Choose a neighbouring segment that shares buyers, uses or partners with the first, so each win makes the next one cheaper.
Work through it
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Mistakes to avoid
- Treating the 2.5%, 13.5% and 34% shares as a forecast. Rogers derived them from a normal curve. The shares in your market are an empirical question.
- Offering visionary customers as references to pragmatists. Pragmatists discount a visionary's success because the visionary took risks they will not take.
- Chasing every mainstream segment at once. A product that is partly complete for five segments is complete for none, and no segment talks about it.
- Quoting each mainstream deal as a bespoke project. Pragmatists want a predictable price they can budget for and compare with the cost of their problem.
Where it comes from
Joe M. Bohlen and George M. Beal of Iowa State College sorted farmers, by when they took up new practices, into innovators, early adopters, early majority, majority and non-adopters (The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18, 1957). Everett M. Rogers generalised the categories as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards in Diffusion of Innovations (Free Press of Glencoe, 1962). Geoffrey A. Moore named the chasm between early adopters and the early majority in Crossing the Chasm (HarperBusiness, 1991; third edition 2014). Source.
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