Using models of innovation diffusion to forecast market success: a practitioners' guide

The paper reviews models of innovation diffusion as the basis for a methodology to analyse business cases for new products and processes. The review is based on a categorization of the models' hypotheses and assumptions. The proposed analytical approach has three steps: First, qualitative research into the innovation's target market is structured along the hypotheses of the diffusion models. Based on this hypotheses-driven assessment of the case study, families of diffusion models are identified that address the characteristics of the case. Third, the models can be applied to the business cases for further quantitative analysis and forecasting. The paper outlines further developments of diffusion models. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.