Diffusion is a Hotbed in Innovation Research 104.0

Everett Rogers pioneers in Diffusion of Innovation
Innovation defies easy definition. This is my attempt at categorizing research efforts on innovation itself.

I hope this effort starts to clarify that, like the true democracy we are, Filipinos are working in applications in all the areas of research. We do need to improve – and greatly – the way we run with the ball.

Indeed, innovation is the subject of much active research. Everett M. Rogers is one such active researcher. Like Rosenberg, he has written a book – the 5th edition is pictured at left – that is a virtual review of literature and meta-analysis on his subject – diffusion of innovation.

There seems to be at least four loci of study within innovation, itself. Each one has a different driver and institutional players – and unique research concerns – like the interactive dance between science and technology:

1. National innovation systems (NIS) driven by country development goals;
2. Invention (or technology) pushing to commercialization;
3. Entrepreneurship (or diffusion) pulling innovations for commercial returns based on identified market needs; and
4. Diffusion research driven by multiple uses in different traditions for public and private goods in rural sociology, marketing (i.e. new products), communications, public health and education.

Comparatively, the table below show the different tracks for each locus.

Unsurprisingly, they have different definitions of innovation itself.

Diffusion research has the broadest definition: “An innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.”

It is the broadest definition because diffusion is at the very back end of the innovation process and has to accept the widest inputs. For public goods, its goal may sometimes be anti-innovation, ie the non-adoption of an idea, practice or object found to be non-beneficial.

It would seem that if I am forced to make a categorization, SYNTHESiST is biased to the first track, National Innovation Systems or NIS. And I define innovation in its aspect as a process towards economic development, “Innovation bridges invention through to diffusion.”

In my definition, I take-off with a technology bias at the invention side but accept that social adaptation becomes more important as the innovation process gets closer to diffusion.

This generic innovation process – which I adapted as framework for SYNTHESiST and whose steps I use as Categories in the sidebar – is the jump-off point for each locus.

In the Philippines, the National innovation systems do the four steps at the same time!? The key institutional framework is the Government-Industry-Academe linkage supporting the process. Some countries like Korea and Taiwan had successfully created specialized and linked RTOs, KIST and ITRI respectively, which had supported and created country winners. In the Philippines, the linkage is weak mainly due, in my mind, to institutional legacies.

STI-Learning is developed at research universities like UP at Los Banos, Central Luzon State U or Central Mindanao U and at the DOST laboratories. Many firms are engaged in adaptive R&D as part of global technology scan-adapt-diffuse strategy to meet the specific needs and constraints (especially price) of the local market. In the mid-1990s, the University of the Philippines’ ISSI with its Technology Business Incubator was an early adopter of this enterprise prototyping and nurturing technique.

There is hardly any effort at competence-building technologies (See my Post # 99) which Japan, for example, focused on in the rebuilding after World War II.

Invention-driven innovation research is the focus of the MIT and Stanford universities in the U.S. Courses with supporting business incubators and, lately, proof –of-concept centers are set up to support student efforts at bring innovative technologies quickly to market. Interestingly, the Ateneo through its Innovation Center (website link here) is focused on this type of research. The technology companies in Route 128 and Silicon Valley are products of this type of research.

Entrepreneur-driven research is the focus for the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation, the largest foundation focused on entrepreneurship in the world, through what they call innovative entrepreneurship. Interestingly, the De la Salle University, in support of its BS Entrepreneurship program, runs a Business Incubator Facility for this approach. Similar to diffusion research, the director of the DLSU incubator, Dr. Aida Velasco , said at the ASIALICS that the type of innovation being incubated as “anything new that has a market.”

Likewise, the ACE at the Asian Institute of Management was a strong proponent of this approach as the strategy of choice in the Philippines.

Diffusion research is ‘diffused’ through all the multiple traditions that practice it. In the private sector, it could very well be embedded in the marketing and product development departments though the field extends beyond the effects of normal marketing efforts to other diffusion channels beyond. For public goods, there is also diffused activity in social marketing like in the adaption of birth control methods, green and organic practices and the like. Professor Ned Roberto, the first Asian co-author of the international marketing guru, Philip Kotler, very early on wrote a book on Social Marketing.

In the Philippines, there could very well be an opportunity for a specialized diffusion intermediary to support the diffusion of innovation.

The real world is more complex than as we wrote above. While the S-curve is a handy device to understand one innovation, the curve for one innovation could very well be composed of many mini S-curves of, say incremental innovations (note image at left), which at some point “path-creates” to a new major
S-curve of radical innovation.

In managing economic development, there is thus a great difficulty in predicting winners. While there is an established theory on path dependence, there is none for path-creation that remains an active area of diffusion research.

In fact, an ITRI executive I talked to humbly declined to accept full credit for Taiwan’s success in semiconductors and now in personal computers. ITRI, as an RTO, started as ERDU in the mid-1970s and was the government innovation agency task with building this winner. To paraphrase his words, “we got lucky that IBM introduced the PC in 1982 out of shelf-components to accelerate development. We took off from there.”

From the institutions involved, the Philippines does seem to have some efforts in all four loci of innovation research. All we need to do is run well with the ball.