The chance for crossing chasm: Constructing the bowling alley

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the research in innovation diffusion can be divided into two categories. One is to cross the chasm and to carry out the diffusion for innovative products. The other one is to do the diffusion forecast for the innovative products. However, crossing the chasm is the most important issue for innovation diffusion. Accordingly, this research put forward the following logic thinking with an intention to solve the problem of crossing the chasm: When thinking about how to construct a bowling alley in the chasm, we need first of all to make sure whether the bowling pins still exist. Then we move on to observe the gap difference between the two ends of the bowling alley and try to fill the gap difference in order to make the innovation diffusion go smoothly. Under this kind of thinking pattern, this study conducts a case study by adopting a clustering method with multi kinds of clusters in it to identify the bowling pins: First of all, we divide the TAM testing collected samples into two clusters and three clusters. We can observe a newly-formed third cluster which is composed of two sub-clusters. This sub-cluster is made up of partial members from the two-cluster division. These two sub-clusters exist separately at both ends of the chasm. They can also be merged as a new cluster. Therefore, we made an assumption that these two sub-clusters may help to build a bowling alley to cross the chasm. We find that the sub-clusters (the early adopters) derived from the public are exactly the bowling pins. They are the target cluster for innovation diffusion. Moreover, we use HCCS to analyze the difference between two sub-clusters which are derived from the third cluster. We further analyze the innovative use value created by the early adopters in the blogs. Through experts` brainstorming meeting, we finish organizing a remedial scheme for the difference resulting from these two sub-clusters. At the end, we proceed again to observe the degree of acceptance by the target cluster. The experimental result confirms that the remedial scheme takes on the capacity to influence the early majority in crossing the chasm, which also proves the effectiveness of the research method. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.