Diffusion of innovations: Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence

This paper attempts to review the theoretical and empirical perspectives of innovation-diffusion literature. The objective of this paper is to develop a heuristic framework by reviewing the existing studies for analyzing the diffusion of innovation and its outcome in different sectors. The formal theoretical and empirical literature on technology diffusion that emerged in the fifties with the epidemic approach has been followed by a voluminous literature spanning different disciplines. From the different strands of literature on analyzing the process of diffusion, the paper finds that there is considerable heterogeneity within theoretical approaches with respect to the process of diffusion. It seems that innovation and diffusion are a complex process that hinges inter alia upon the nature of innovation, adopters' characteristics, institutional context and that all these vary over the time and space.