The Theory of Innovation Adoption in Agriculture: An Application
What needs to be overcome to experience seamless innovation pull through?
Three months ago, I published Predictably Irrational: The Dilemma of AgTech Adoption, which was intended to bring to light that we often oversimplify agtech adoption and underappreciate important aspects of innovation adoption within agriculture.
This led me to begin talking more with founders and farmers, reading 3rd party research, and being retrospective on my experience to find more concrete considerations.
There has been a lot of work done surrounding innovation adoption within agriculture.
In fact, what is not often acknowledged is the fact that the “Innovation Adoption Curve”, made popular by Geoffrey Moore in the book Crossing the Chasm, was based on corn hybrid adoption research in Iowa done in the 1940s to learn about the diffusion of innovation.
Source
The adoption research has been known to have shortcomings, such as the fact that the context of each individual is always different.
Digging into contextual considerations led me to research from Geoff Kaine out of New Zealand.
He applies many consumer-driven insights to technology adoption within ag, something I have been adamant about within farming. We think of farming as a purely B2B situation— dollars and cents driven. But farmers have much in common with the decisions of a consumer, such as a desire for simplicity or the realities of being socially accepted and signaling specific attributes to friends or neighbors. This is distinct from generally accepted B2B business considerations.
Consumer Driven Dynamics
Broadly speaking, there are three sources of consumer-driven adoption - interest, sign, and hedonic.
Interest concerns the performance of the product or activity in utilitarian, economic and functional terms. Sign concerns the contribution of the product or activity to how they view themselves and impression management (signaling). Hedonic is the extent to which the product or activity satisfies pleasure or experiential goals.
This can similarly be applied to farmers.
In The Adoption of Agricultural Innovations, Kaine introduces five important considerations from previous research that can be used to identify a farmers willingness to adopt: