Diffusion of innovations

What Hacker News says

1. r0ze-at-hnMar 2026
   Nearly 20 years ago after reading Diffusion of Innovations I decided to use everything in the book. The company ran off a few svn servers (formally cvs) and so I ran a handful of Git courses at my work to help us ultimately migrate to Git (this was early days of Git). I explicitly tried to find folks not just near me, but physically around the office building across all of the floors, teams, and orgs. They were my early adopters and when random folks would come to me either curious or for help I would bring them to the "local" expert and together solve their problem, from there they had a local expert and little hubs sprung up. We had the standard svn => git mirror going when the time came to convert to Git full time in the office it was very painless and a complete success.

   I was too young to understand that this is how you run a successful "transformation project", I simply was having fun using every trick from that book and done the same playbook a number of times over my career.

   Show morethread
2. wolfticketsJan 2025
   1. The Pragmatic Programmer.

   2. Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.

   3. Diffusion of Innovations.

   4. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.

   5. Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash.

   6. Writing to Learn.

   7. On Writing Well.

   8. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware.

   9. Thinking In Systems: A Primer.

   10. The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company.

   Show morethread
3. specialistJan 2023
   Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity [2000]

   https://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/...

   Formal definitions for interfaces and so forth. Completely changed my mental model for my work.

   Paraphrasing from book (from memory): "Architecture" is the set of visible design choices.

   Design Rules is to software methodology what Diffusion of Innovations is to product development.

   There is some overlap between Design Rules and Diffusion of Innovations, of course. They're compliments.

   Show morethread
4. specialistJan 2022
   > American Affairs Journal ... has leaned heavily to promoting America First protectionism and Trumpism...

   I don't have a dog in this fight, but this doesn't sound right. As newly minted socialist-libertarian (anarchist), I don't spend a lot of time parsing intellectual conservative notions, either movement conservative or otherwise.

   In his own words:

   https://www.vox.com/21528267/the-ezra-klein-show-trumpism-do...

   At the time, I more or less agreed with u/Metacatalepsy's hot take:

   https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/jfzujb/new_episo...

   > So, please read critically.

   Again, I don't think this is fair.

   OC contrasts DARPA with Operation Warp Speed. Like how programs and contracts are managed differently, in an effort to "right size" their respective efforts.

   It's like the difference between angel and later stage investors. DARPA's remit is to try a bunch of crazy ideas, see what happens. OWS's mission was to rush promising ideas to market.

   Being a huge fan of the book Diffusion of Innovations, the basis for pop-biz books like Crossing the Chasm, the need for Operation Warp Speed strategy is both obvious and necessary.

   Show morethread
5. specialistOct 2021
   Yes and:

   > ...farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools.

   Rogers' book Diffusion of Innovations is the seminal text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

   "The study of diffusion of innovations took off in the subfield of rural sociology in the midwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Agriculture technology was advancing rapidly, and researchers started to examine how independent farmers were adopting hybrid seeds, equipment, and techniques. A study of the adoption of hybrid corn seed in Iowa by Ryan and Gross (1943) solidified the prior work on diffusion into a distinct paradigm that would be cited consistently in the future. Since its start in rural sociology, Diffusion of Innovations has been applied to numerous contexts..."

   My introduction to "innovation" was Geoffrey Moore's pop biz book Crossing the Chasm. Derivative work that doesn't even cite Rogers' work. Moore spins "just so" stories. Rogers explains the research, concrete and actionable.

   Imagine my chagrin when I stumbled onto Rogers. If it's not obvious, I'm still grumpy about Moore's omission. I don't mind that he profited from popularizing important ideas. Not acknowledging the precedents is something like theft.

   Show morethread
6. crispyambulanceJun 2020
   > ... this is what mid-sized companies are and I just have to endure and keep pushing.

   For your own well-being and career happiness, I think you'll need to be strategic about exactly how you "keep pushing" for change.

   Changing habits in an organization is _extremely_ difficult. You can't just provide a list of practices, make a terse case for each one, and expect people to just say "Oh, I see, you're right, let me retrain myself on multiple complex topics and then change everything about how I work, while at the same time figure out how to explain all this to project managers."

   The time scale for implementing what you call "the basics" in a workplace with a dozen or so people is going to be more than a year-- at best, if you do everything right and are people person with enormous leadership leverage.

   Read about "Diffusion of Innovations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations). It's an arguably successful theory for how organizations implement technological changes. It was originally conceived by social scientists who studied how farmers (that's right, the agriculture industry) adapted to change. The most fundamental aspect of putting this theory to work is that you need to recognize and find "early adopters". Early adopters have two characteristics which are important for spreading change: 1. they're willing to try new things just for the novelty of it, 2. they're influential, others look up to them as examples. If you focus you initial efforts on a very small (even 1 or 2) "early adopters", that's the first step to success. There's a lot more after that, like training and dealing with laggards (people who need to be forced to change), but I don't want to type an article.

   Show morethread