The Innovation Divide
Same evidence, different assigned strength — appetite mistaken for epistemic judgment
The Innovation Divide is a Genesis vignette name for a truth failure: a team faces one body of evidence for a genuinely new method, yet participants assign different strengths to the same claim — innovator as nearly proven, pragmatist as unconvincing, laggard as fashion. They are not reading different data. They are reading the same data through different appetites — building versus protecting, gain versus loss — and calling the result an argument about facts.
Introduction: Where Everything Breaks. Development: Every Statement Has a Tier — explicit tier separates how strongly the claim is supported from how much I want it to be true.
Not the same as the chasm
The vignette borrows role labels (innovator, pragmatist, laggard) familiar from diffusion of innovation (Everett Rogers) but does not reproduce Rogers’s adoption-curve theory. It names a misreading of epistemic tier, not a model of how innovations spread over time.
Related external frames
- Diffusion of innovation — how new ideas spread; Innovation S-curve; adopter categories.
- Groupthink — cohesive groups suppress dissent; tier collapsed into unanimity.
- The innovator’s dilemma (Clayton Christensen) — why incumbents miss disruptive change; organisational economics, not same-room tier disagreement.
- Reserved material (Outlook) — promotion/prevention and temporal/positional bias frameworks may extend the vignette; not yet published.