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Markets tip at about 15 percent
The adoption curve
The law of diffusion of innovation splits a population into groups. The first 2.5 percent are innovators, the next 13.5 percent are early adopters, and the next 34 percent are the early majority, followed by the late majority and the laggards. Between the early adopters and the early majority sits a gap, which Jeffrey Moore calls crossing the chasm, because the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first.
Who goes first
Innovators and early adopters make intuitive decisions, driven by what they believe about the world more than by which product is available. Some people stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when it first came out, though one could have been bought off the shelf the following week. Others spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. They did it because they wanted to be first.
Businesses often put their conversion on new business at about 10 percent, and about 10 percent of customers are the ones who just get it. Telling those customers apart from the ones who don't, before doing business, is the problem.
Where do the adoption percentages come from?
Sociologist Everett Rogers popularized the curve in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations. His starting point was research on how Iowa farmers adopted hybrid seed corn in the 1930s and 1940s. He drew the groups from a bell curve: innovators fall beyond two standard deviations from the mean, early adopters between one and two. The early and late majority each cover one standard deviation on either side of the middle.
Why does the chasm exist?
Consultant Geoffrey Moore described the chasm in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm. Early adopters are visionaries who accept a rough product for a chance at advantage. The early majority are pragmatists who want proven results and references from people like them. Because of that mismatch, a company's early customers often cannot vouch for it to the next group.
How do ideas spread through networks?
Rogers identified five traits that shape how fast an innovation spreads: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Products people can try cheaply and see others using tend to spread faster. His work also stressed that opinion leaders inside a community pass new ideas along through personal contact. Hybrid corn took roughly a decade to move from first adopters to most Iowa farms.
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