top of page
This site was designed with the
.com
website builder. Create your website today.Start Now

 

Theme

Reviewing long standing concepts of innovation: McLuhan, technology confluence, connections/disconnections, Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation. We will be particularly interested in looking at the iPad through the lens of these perspectives. The iPad is one of those disruptive technologies that can teach us a good deal about how innovation works.

 

Overview

This week we will look at some innovation theory that you may have already addressed in 724e, as well as some new ideas in this area, notably Roger's theory of the diffusion of innovations and the S Curve. Specifically you are going to look at the following:

 

  • 1. McLuhan's Tetrad. Most of you have taken Media Psych 724e, in which we looked at McLuhan's Tetrad for understanding and predicting media impacts and media evolution. This is still one of the most enduring thought tools in use in understanding innovation. A refresher will serve us well.

 

  • 2. Technology Connects and Disconnects. If you have taken 724e, you have heard me refer to this. The concept is simple. Think of it as an adaptation of Newton's Third Law to the study of technology adoption: whenever a technology connects you to an opportunity or activity, it disconnects you from something else. This is a touchstone concept you can use as you study technological impacts. I often ask myself, as I stare at a new gadget or screen full of recently purchased software, how does this connect me, how does it disconnect me? We are interested in disconnections because they reveal opportunities for innovation. Another way of looking at connects/disconnects is, what are the short term impacts (which are often positive and connective) and what are the long term impacts (which often reveal disconnective properties)?

 

  • 2.5 Technology replaces and predicts. Look around you. Each item or technology in your life replaced something. It will in turn be replaced by something that perhaps we can't even imagine yet, which might combine a number of the technologies (more about this in the technology Innovation Game). So what did your coffee cup, headphones, Bic Pen, scissors, whatever replace? What might replace them?

 

  • 3. The Technology Innovation Game. In 724e, we also looked at my "intersecting circles of media innovation" when we played the technology innovation game. This focuses on how new technology emerges in practical ways. The point of this tool is help you see the technology around you as being goal driven combinations of multiple technologies. That is, innovators often combine technologies to create a new technology; the purpose behind the new technology determines its nature.

 

  • 4. The Technological Life Cycle S Curve. Wikipedia addresses this quite well. From the Wikipedia introduction: "The technology life-cycle (TLC) describes the commercial gain of a product through the expense of research and development phase, and the financial return during its "vital life". Some technologies, such as steel, paper or cement manufacturing, have a long lifespan (with minor variations in technology incorporated with time) whilst in other cases, such as electronic or pharmaceutical products, the lifespan may be quite short."

 

  • 5. Roger's Diffusion of Innovations. This may be new to some of you. Roger's work is seminal as one of the first scientific approaches to understanding how innovation spreads. He studied how farmers in a particular community adopted new kinds of seeds, from which emerged a mathematical model about how change happens, specifically the adoption of new ideas. He came up with the terms innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards to describe how people adopt innovation. These terms are still in wide use today.

 

Reading/viewing

 

 

  • Topic 2: Technology Connects and Disconnects. Nothing to review for now.

 

  • Topic 2.5: Technology replaces and predicts. Nothing to review for now.

 

 

 

  • Topic 5: Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations

         Read:

- Wikipedia's entry on Diffusion of Innovations

  and/or

- Les Robinson's "A summary of Diffusion of Innovations" (2009)

and

- Jack Lule's Mass Media, New Technology and the Public. This applies the diffusion of innovations to the iPad.

 

Watch:

- Dr. Tom Valente's Diffusion of Innovations. What is important to us is his lecture up to 5:30. Valente explains where the Diffusion of Innovations came from in this first five minutes, and we see how human behavior related to farmers and seed adoption is relevant to us today as we seek to understand those of us living digital lifestyles.

and/or

- John Hooker's overview of the Diffusion of Innovations. This is a screencast from a course in which the students are studying the diffusion of innovations.

and

- Simon Sinek's Diffusion of Innovations. This is a very unique approach to this topic; he doesn't actually get to Roger's work until the end, but leading up to it posits the following theory: we buy from companies who share our belief systems, often without knowing it.

 

Moodle discussion

Here are four questions that drive the discussion this week. In terms of the iPad (and other technologies you wish to discuss):

  1. What to do you see when you apply McLuhan's Tetrad to this new technology?

 

  2. In what ways is the technology under consideration a confluence of other technologies, re: the intersecting circles theory of innovation?

 

  3. How does this technology connect? How does it disconnect?

 

  4. How does the Diffusion of Innovations help you understand this technology, and technological change in general?

 

Week 2 (9/16-22) Review, Foundations

bottom of page