Diffusing your Innovation

To manage your innovation journey to the end, be sure you've done enough to make people adopt your new idea.

A great idea implemented perfectly will be of no use to your organization if no one adopts it. A new product must be bought by customers if it is to succeed in the marketplace, and a new procedure must be followed by employees for it to have any effect. To manage your innovation journey to the end, be sure you've done enough to make people adopt your new idea.

No innovation is adopted all at once. The process is cumulative: initially only a few people take a new idea on board. They are gradually joined by more and more users until the last few percent trickle in at the end of the process. A graph of percentage adopters against time takes on a characteristic S-shaped curve.

A key message from this is to work with potential early adopters at as soon a stage as possible. Getting them involved in testing and trials, learning from their feedback, and building their ideas into the final innovation can help kick the adoption curve upward.

This is where tools like prototyping are useful, giving potential adopters the chance to see, touch, and play with an idea before it is finalized, so you can get their reactions and ideas to help improve it.

ACTION POINT: Keep an eye out for people willing to engage with new products or processes and invite them to participate in testing.