Diffusion of innovations

Epidemiology of widgets



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Models such as the Bass diffusion model impose an epidemiological structure on the contagion of products, with a survival analysis flavour. Or, if you’d like, memetics but for technical ideas rather than beliefs.

Incoming

  • Getting The Word Out—by Steven Johnson

    I wrote about the disappointing—though I suppose not surprising—lack of coverage of the death of Dilip Mahalanabis, the Bangladeshi doctor who played a critical role in popularizing Oral Rehydration Therapy, the amazingly simply medical intervention that has saved millions of lives around the world over the past fifty years. I noted that as far as I could tell, no mainstream news organization outside of India had run so much as a brief obituary of Mahalanabis, despite the heroic nature of his initial adoption of ORT in the middle of a refugee crisis in the early 1970s, and the long-term legacy of his work. (The Lancet once called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century”.) …when we talk about the history of innovation, we often over-index on the inventors and underplay the critical role of popularizers, the people who are unusually gifted at making the case for adopting a new innovation, or who have a platform that gives them an unusual amount of influence.

References

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Bakshy, Eytan, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, and Lada Adamic. 2012. The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion.” In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, 519–28. WWW ’12. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Bass, Frank M. 1969. A New Product Growth for Model Consumer Durables.” Management Science 15 (5): 215–27.
———. 2004. Comments on ‘A New Product Growth for Model Consumer Durables The Bass Model’.” Management Science 50 (12_supplement): 1833–40.
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Goel, Sharad, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts. 2015. The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion.” Management Science, July, 150722112809007.
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Guidolin, Mariangela, and Piero Manfredi. 2023. Innovation Diffusion Processes: Concepts, Models, and Predictions.” Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 10 (1): 451–73.
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Romero, Daniel M., Brendan Meeder, and Jon Kleinberg. 2011. Differences in the Mechanics of Information Diffusion Across Topics: Idioms, Political Hashtags, and Complex Contagion on Twitter.” In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, 695–704. WWW ’11. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.
Rossman, Gabriel. 2012. Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sinha, Rajiv K., and Murali Chandrashekaran. 1992. A Split Hazard Model for Analyzing the Diffusion of Innovations.” Journal of Marketing Research 29 (1): 116–27.
Young, H Peyton. 2002. “The Diffusion of Innovations in Social Networks.”

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