Friday, April 24, 2015

Assignment 11A: Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Efrat Kasznik in class talked about this graph, otherwise known as the Technology Adoption Lifecycle (TALC) which depicts the progress of a company's product through its life stages as it relates to IP. The area under the graph is the number of customers using the product.

  • In the beginning, people using the product are innovators who are the most excited to try out the new product. These people are generally more educated, prosperous and risk-oriented.
  • In the second stage, early adopters are usually be younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders, and less prosperous.
  • The early majority are more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours.
  • The late majority are older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active.
  • Finally, the laggards are very conservative, the least well-off, the oldest, and the least educated.
As you can tell, the user base of a product grows more conservative, less educated, and less active as time goes on. This trend can be seen in multiple industries; one that comes to mind is the desktop market. As time went on and substitutes became more widely available, the majority of people today who use desktops tend to be of the older generation. 


2 comments:

  1. I think your TALC graph is really cool and informative. I would say that college students at Berkeley are likely to be early adopters, even though sometimes I do not immediately adopt the new technologies that are released. Great post!

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  2. Nice job explaining the TALC. I actually had a little difficulty understanding that one too. I like how you clearly delineate what each metric of the graph represents, one of the most important (of course) elements to any graph. Out of curiousity, are there any thoughts you may have had about applying this to the startup industry?

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