This week we launched our latest report: The Diffusion of Digital Ordering. The report considers the theory of the Diffusion of Innovation and explores the position of digital ordering within the technology adoption curve; has it yet crossed the adoption chasm?
But what is the theory? Diffusion of Innovation is an explanation for how, over an undefined period, a product or concept can gain momentum and ‘diffuse’ through a population or market. If successful, the result is that mainstream society, or marketplaces, adopt and make use of the product or concept.
The adoption curve, as it’s known, can be divided into five sections, each occupied by a buyer persona. In order, they are: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. Simple enough. However, lying between the Early Adopters and Early Majority is the ‘chasm’. It is this that our report pays attention to with regards digital ordering and, indeed, what most technology companies are concerned with.
In effect, crossing the chasm represents a transition from the early market into the mainstream for a technology. Once past this zone, technologies and their suppliers are arguably more likely to achieve hyper-growth and mass adoption. It is why crossing the chasm is taken so seriously by anyone with an interest in a new, or developing, technology.
In our Diffusion of Digital Ordering report, we shine a light on this theory and consider the path that digital ordering has taken up until this moment as well as if, and when, it passed across the chasm. Certainly, digital ordering has been around for some time. The first, known as World Wide Waiter, was introduced to the market 26 years ago, in the year 1995, but the path towards mass adoption hasn’t been rapid.
While some big-name groups and smaller indie brands took on the technology, by 2018, they still represented just a small portion of the wider industry. In our report we consider what, if anything has changed and why.
You can download the report and see what our explorations revealed, here.
