Innovation and Diffusion

Hall on Diffusion

8 October 2003

18.

Innovation and Diffusion

Bronwyn H. Hall1

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Hall on Diffusion

8 October 2003

18.1. Introduction
In 1953, a young female Macaque monkey in the south of Japan washed a muddy sweet potato in a stream before eating it. This obvious improvement in food preparation was imitated quickly by other monkeys and in less than 10 years it became the norm in her immediate group; by 1983, the method had diffused completely. In 1956, the same monkey innovated again, inventing a technique in which handfuls of mixed sand and wheat grains were cast upon the sea, so that the floating cereal could be skimmed from the surface. Again, by 1983, this method of gleaning wheat had diffused almost completely throughout the local populations of Macaques.2 Besides the obvious fact that humankind does not have a monopoly on innovation, these examples illustrate a couple of things about the diffusion of innovations: first, when they are clearly better than what went before, new ideas of how to do things will usually spread via a “learning by observing” process, and second, the process can take some time; in these cases it took thirty years, and the life cycle of the Macaque monkey is somewhat shorter than ours (Kawai, Watanabe, and Mori 1992).

Turning to the world of humans, it is safe to say that without diffusion, innovation would have little social or economic impact. In the study of innovation, the word diffusion is commonly used to describe the process by which individuals and firms in a society/economy adopt a new technology, or replace an older technology with a newer. But diffusion is not only the means by which innovations become useful by being spread throughout a population, it is also an intrinsic part of the innovation process, as learning, imitation, and feedback effects which arise from its unfolding enhance the original innovation.3

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Hall on Diffusion

8 October 2003

In many ways, understanding the... [continues]

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