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Abstract
Innovation is an idea, practice, object, new technical product, scientific knowledge, application method, or tool that is perceived as new by an individual or unit of adoption facilitating problem solving for potential adopters or customers. Diffusion is the process to communicate innovations for adoption and gaining acceptance through certain channels over time among the members of a social system or a certain community. Diffusion process has a rate of spread or adoption by potential adopters depending on some characteristics also called attributes. These attributes are widely discussed in literature and include: relative advantage, comparability, complexity, trial-ability and observability. This paper is to discuss innovations, their diffusion and attributes on which the rate of diffusion depends.
Introduction
Innovation is an idea, practice, object, new technical product, scientific knowledge, application method, or tool that is perceived as new by an individual or unit of adoption facilitating problem solving for potential adoption (Inman, 2000; Sahin, 2006; Tolba & Mourad, n.d; and Robinson, 2009). Different adopters perceive and assess innovations in a variety of ways (Tolba & Mourad n.d). Whereas diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated for adoption and gaining acceptance through certain channels over time among the members of a social system or a certain community (Sahin, 2006; Al-Jabri et al, 2012) and KOÇAK et al, 2013). Diffusion is special type of communication in which the messages are about a new idea. But an innovation, no matter how well designed, would be perceived useless if it is not adopted. Therefore, one of the important duties of those responsible for an innovation is to maximize its rate of adoption (Chigona, & Licker 2008) by its diffusion. Rate of adoption being a measure of number of individuals who adopt the innovation for a period is the relative speed with, which members of a social system adopt an innovation Sahin 2006) and depends on some characteristics or attributes of the innovation. Attributes are the characteristics of the innovation that may be perceived either positively or negatively, and include: relative advantage, comparability, complexity, trial-ability and observability (Bertrand, 2004). The perceived attributes of an innovation are significant predictors of the rate of adoption. Almost 49-87% of the variance in the rate of adoption of innovations is explained...