Strategic approaches to technology adoption

Knowing how and when to implement new technology is an ongoing challenge in highly competitive, innovation-driven industries such as chemicals and electronics. Using the emerging field of combinatorial materials science as the primary example, this discussion enumerates, describes, and illustrates the seven specific stages a company must go through in the successful adoption and assimilation of innovation. These stages, as depicted over a single S curve, include: awareness, acquisition, application, acceptance, communication, assimilation, and incremental iteration. The competitive advantages of early technology adoption are described, as are the issues involved in implementing a combinatorial, or high-speed, approach to new materials discovery. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Lab Robotics and Automation 11: 330–334, 1999