Page - 852 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 16852 should be seen as a long-term, complicated process of influences transmitted through many different means and channels of communication. But Strada did play an important role in this process. Application of the diffusion of in- novation paradigm may help better to understand the nature of his particular contribution. This paradigm describes how an innovation—a new idea, tech- nology or practice, which is either invented locally, or first introduced into a given social system by an ‘external agent’—tends first to be taken up by a very limited group of ‘innovators’. They are followed by a slightly larger and increas- ing group of ‘early adopters’, who, as ‘opinion leaders’, often are instrumental in persuading the later adopter categories—the ‘early majority’, the ‘late major- ity’ and the ‘laggards’—to embrace the innovation. The rate of adoption of an innovation tends to follow an S-curve between its first adoption by the innova- tors and its general acceptance even by the ‘laggards’ [Fig. 16.3].33 Characteristics of the ‘innovator’ are that he is ‘venturesome’, that he is interested in new ideas, less prone to prejudices, more disposed to take risks 33 The following paragraph is mostly based on Chapter vii, Innovativeness and Adopter Cat- egories in Rogers 2003, in particular pp. 282–285, ‘Adopter Categories as Ideal Types’, and 287–292, ‘Characteristics of Adopter Categories’. Innovators 2.5% Early Adopters 13.5% Early Majority 34% Late Majority 34% Laggards 16% 100 75 50 25 0 Figure 16.3 Graph showing the general rate of adoption of an innovation among various groups of the receiving social system; based on Rogers’ Diffusion of Innova- tions, 2003.