Innovation Diffusion, Network Features, and Cultural Communication Variables

Over the last two decades, the utilization as well as applied study of collaborative networks has become central to both public- and private-sector management. Interorganizational networks may function better or worse than the traditional institution of the firm, with its internal role and authority distribution structures, depending on a number of factors, among others homophily (isomorphism, similarity) versus heterophily (heterogeneity, variety), cultural affinity versus cultural distance in communications, the quality of internal and external network relationships as these evolve, and the pace of innovation adoption. All of these factors, delineated in the present study, help define the aptness of organizational network form to innovation adoption and adaptation. One of the authors (the late Everett M. Rogers), a pioneer in the communications and innovation-diffusion fields, defines a network as “interconnected individuals who are linked by patterned communication flows”; thus framed, networks span various levels of action analysis, from the individual to the interorganizational and systemic. As they encompass micro- and macro-cultural dimensions of communications about innovation (Rogers & Agarwala-Rogers, 1976, p. 10), networked interpersonal, inter-group, and intercultural communications may be seen as progressively more comprehensive critical variables in the diffusion of innovation. The present study, built on an earlier research note (Rivera & Rogers, 2004), evaluates three social programs in the United States using Rogers’ diffusion of innovations (DIM) model: (1) The STOPAIDS preventive health public education program in San Francisco, designed in the early eighties around the Rogers step-wise diffusion model (opinion leaders to adopters), and launched in two waves, first in the early eighties to early nineties and then again in the late nineties; (2) the National Library of Medicine’s efforts to disseminate clinically-applicable scientific findings to health professionals, especially members of racial and ethnic minorities; and (3) a webbased, cancer prevention nutrition-education project of the National Cancer Institute across seven national demonstration sites, aimed at women in minority communities, called the Health Communication Intervention Research Initiative.