Developing Capacity for Innovation in Complex Systems

5 The spread and uptake of innovation

Introduction

Everyday conversations in organisations and media seem to put a premium on creativity and ideas – the front-end of innovation – and not so much on how these are introduced into the marketplace. On the other hand, researchers have for decades been interested in how the spread and uptake of innovations occur.

How innovations spread and are taken up by users and consumers is of utmost importance to research, organisations, and society at large. From a theoretical standpoint, it is arguable that one can actually talk about an innovation if that innovation has low traction, since that would indicate that the “innovation” has low value. In a sense, it can be seen as a failure of the innovation process. ...