Understanding Diffusion of Recurrent Innovations

TL;DR

This paper presents a large-scale analysis of recurrent innovation diffusion in mobile app updates, revealing unique adoption behaviors and new adopter categories influenced by technological development.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze recurrent innovations' diffusion, highlighting their distinct adoption patterns and influencing features in the context of mobile apps.

Findings

Identification of new adopter categories for recurrent innovations

Recurrent innovations exhibit different diffusion patterns than single innovations

Features impacting adoption include technological and user behavior factors

Abstract

The diffusion of innovations theory has been studied for years. Previous research efforts mainly focus on key elements, adopter categories, and the process of innovation diffusion. However, most of them only consider single innovations. With the development of modern technology, recurrent innovations gradually come into vogue. In order to reveal the characteristics of recurrent innovations, we present the first large-scale analysis of the adoption of recurrent innovations in the context of mobile app updates. Our analysis reveals the adoption behavior and new adopter categories of recurrent innovations as well as the features that have impact on the process of adoption.