Diffusion of Innovation
How new ideas spread through a population over time
Diffusion of innovation is the study of how innovations spread — from first awareness through adoption and institutionalisation — across individuals and organisations over time. The canonical modern statement is Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations.
Adopter categories
Rogers classifies people by relative time of adoption:
These labels appear in the Genesis vignette The Innovation Divide — but there the failure is not slow diffusion. It is five people in one room assigning five different strengths to one claim. Rogers explains who adopts when; the Innovation Divide explains why tier gets confused with appetite in the same conversation.
Homophily and the S-curve
Rogers argues that people are homophilous — they communicate preferentially with others who are similar — and that this clustering shapes the Innovation S-curve over time. Ideas spread fast inside homogeneous groups and cross boundaries slowly. The constructive bridge is heterophily (contact across difference); the pathological block is heterophobia — aversion to unlike bearers and their claims.
For judgment infrastructure, homophily and heterophobia are failure-mode lenses, not adoption trivia: they explain homophilic dismissal, Cassandra syndrome, heterophobic persecution, and why correct minorities struggle to move truth through homophilic closure — see homophily.
Corpus stance
A2 — working context: We cite Rogers as context for vocabulary, for the adoption lifecycle that Geoffrey Moore’s chasm model refines, and for homophily/heterophobia as social explanations when truth is buried or dissent punished. We do not adopt the full diffusion model as epistemic doctrine — tier and commitment remain our primary honesty tools. Majority-centre risk is a separate corpus term for collective bind mediocrity; Rogers did not define it.