Strategic Case Analysis
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Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC)
This is also known as the Technology Diffusion Life Cycle.
It states that users of technology fall into five categories
based on how they adopt a technology based product:
innovators, early adaptors, early majority, late majority,
and laggards. These different user groups occupy different
segments of a bell curve, as shown below:
The above bell curve illustrates that the early and late
majorities of users roughly fall within one standard
deviation of the mean. For a technology product to be
somewhat successful, the early majority should be fully on
board. For it to be really successful, the late majority of
users have also to be really won over.
However, before the early majority starts using a product,
innovators and early adopters are the ones who try it out,
and they represent less than 20% of the intended user base.
If a company is successful in getting the early majority to
buy its product, it captures 50% of the intended user base.
This is apparently a daunting task, because most
technology products introduced in the marketplace don’t
achieve this.
Geoffrey Moore explains in his book “Crossing the Chasm”
that this happens because a chasm exists between the early
adopters and early majority, most of the technology
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