Exploring diffusion of innovation adoption attributes: a cross-disciplinary literature analysis

Diffusion of innovations is a theory that revolves around the process of introducing technological innovations into a system through the many available different channels of communication. The purpose of this paper is to undertake a systematic review of the literature available for this theory to gain an insight into the spread of the attributes that regulate the diffusion process of an innovation in question. ISI Web of Knowledge® and Google Scholar were the two search engines deployed for extracting the data relevant to this review. These engines fetched 2,073 publications in total that had cited the Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory. At the completion of the screening process only 223 publications were shortlisted as relevant. The analysis of these publications will be mainly carried out across the demographic features. These features have been typically categorised into seven demographic trends – frequency, year of publication, journals, conferences, authors, country, and number of citations. A cross sector analysis will be carried out to essentially place discussions over the sector specific innovations. These will then depict the informative trends emerging from these features which will be highlighted as the findings, along with the presentation of limitations and suggestions from this review.