I've applied Ev Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation theory and video in
putting together a learning history for a client last year. I had been
asked to find out why this company had been so successful in introducing a
new product. What we all found out was that the company was at a pivotal
point in the diffusion. It HAD BEEN successful, but if the company did
not move past just having missionaries seed the innovation, it would not
catch on and be adopted by the early and late majority. We used video to
disseminate the learning from the early stages and to "pass the baton"
from the missionaries to the early adopters who would widen the acceptance
of the innovation.
Your comment, "to be very sensitive to the separation of the observer from
the observed" is intriguing to me. I think we worked very hard to come to
some shared understanding of what had happened and what needed to happen,
and the video was just a way to get the story out for more people to talk
about what now needed to happen. The video was a dialogue between one of
the missionaries who started the innovation, one of the early adopters in
the field who would now be responsible for moving the company to wider
promotion of the new product, and me, the "historian."
I'm intrigued to go back and ask some of the observers what they "saw" and
"felt" from the video. I've only heard that the innovation is
infiltrating the field, but don't know what impact the video had in
accomplishing this.
You may be right that "What lasts is the impact of the medium itself (as
described by McLuhan), which may be very different from the desired
"learning".
I wonder if video might not be more appropriate as a medium to spread the
learning, the point in time capture of where a diffusion is, but maybe not
appropriate in the earliest stage---where the diffisuion process is so
fragile that video (and the implicit interpretation of the observer)
actually would get in the way???
Alexia Martin
Co-Development International
12950 Saratoga Avenue
Saratoga, CA 95070
408 366-0466
408 366-0474 fax
From: AlexiaM@aol.com