Crossing the Chasm
266
PART 1WO: DESIGN AND EVOlUTION OF TECHNOlOGY STRATEGY
EXHIBIT 1 TheTechnologyAdoption Life Cycle.
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Virtually all contemporary thinking about high-tech marketing strategy has its roots in the Technology
Adoption Ute Cycle, a model which ll'ew out of social research begun in the late 1950s about how communities respolKtto discontinuous innovations.
Truly discontinuous innovations are new products or services that require the end user and the marketplace to dramatically change their past behavior, with the promise of gaining equally dramatic new benefits. Applied to marketing, the model postulates that when a marketplace is confronted with the opportunity to switch to a new infrastructure paradigm-from typewriters, say, to word processorscustomers self-segregate along an axis of risk aversion, with the risk-immune innovators moving to the forefront, asking-even demanding-to be first to try out the new opportunity, while the risk-allergic laggards retreat to the rear of the line (quills still finnly in hand). In between, the model identifies three additional communities-the early adopters. early majority, and later majority.
Graphically, the model is represented as a bell curve (Exhibit I):
Each of the segmentsin the bell curve representsa standarddeviation from the nonn. Thus the early and late majority are one standard deviation from the nonn, eachcomprising about a third of the total population, while the early adoptersand laggards are two and the innovatorsthreestandarddeviations away.The idea is that changewill be adopted from left to right, with eachconstituencycorning to the fore in sequence.
Prior to encountering this model, high-tech marketers were in desperateneed of help. Most of us had
grown up in a businessenvironment where excellence in marketing was
PART 1WO: DESIGN AND EVOlUTION OF TECHNOlOGY STRATEGY
EXHIBIT 1 TheTechnologyAdoption Life Cycle.
lit
~
0
..JJ
d
>
0
C
t'
t-f
Crossing Chasm-j
Crossi the
Geoffrey A. Moore
f
w
i
l:'
>-
"C
0
"m
~
G)
w
I
.s
~
~
Virtually all contemporary thinking about high-tech marketing strategy has its roots in the Technology
Adoption Ute Cycle, a model which ll'ew out of social research begun in the late 1950s about how communities respolKtto discontinuous innovations.
Truly discontinuous innovations are new products or services that require the end user and the marketplace to dramatically change their past behavior, with the promise of gaining equally dramatic new benefits. Applied to marketing, the model postulates that when a marketplace is confronted with the opportunity to switch to a new infrastructure paradigm-from typewriters, say, to word processorscustomers self-segregate along an axis of risk aversion, with the risk-immune innovators moving to the forefront, asking-even demanding-to be first to try out the new opportunity, while the risk-allergic laggards retreat to the rear of the line (quills still finnly in hand). In between, the model identifies three additional communities-the early adopters. early majority, and later majority.
Graphically, the model is represented as a bell curve (Exhibit I):
Each of the segmentsin the bell curve representsa standarddeviation from the nonn. Thus the early and late majority are one standard deviation from the nonn, eachcomprising about a third of the total population, while the early adoptersand laggards are two and the innovatorsthreestandarddeviations away.The idea is that changewill be adopted from left to right, with eachconstituencycorning to the fore in sequence.
Prior to encountering this model, high-tech marketers were in desperateneed of help. Most of us had
grown up in a businessenvironment where excellence in marketing was