A novel chance model for building innovation diffusion scenario

Abstract

In order to stay in business, nowadays companies frequently face the problem of choosing new technologies in making new products. To stay in the trend, firms need to sift out useful new technologies from available technologies to gain competitive edges. In this research, we propose a chance model to help creating an innovation diffusion scenario. Three different filtering methods were developed in this model: first, frequent knowledge and outlier were ruled out using upper bound and lower bound of rare chances which were determined by the statistical distribution of skewness. Second, a new event detection method filtered out rare but older event while maximum entropy method filtered out rare but inactive technologies. Third, the diffusion path crossing chasm was discovered and its social influence guaranteeing a successful scenario was estimated. Case study showed the trend of DVD, which followed our model to discover an innovation diffusion scenario; the weak-tie, LIETON-IT, is the diffusion path for diffusing the new technology, H-H DVD-DUAL, into the DVD-DUAL social network. Besides, our model also discovered LIETON-IT owns stronger social influence power to diffuse H-H DVD-DUAL into the social network. The experimental results evidence the usefulness of our model in building innovation diffusion scenario. ©2010 IEEE.