Understanding Diffusion of Recurrent Innovations

Abstract

The diffusion of innovations theory has been studied for years. Previous research efforts mainly focus on key elements, adopter categories, and the process of innovation diffusion. However, most of them only consider single innovations. With the development of modern technology, recurrent innovations gradually come into vogue. In order to reveal the characteristics of recurrent innovations, we present the first large-scale analysis of the adoption of recurrent innovations in the context of mobile app updates. Our analysis reveals the adoption behavior and new adopter categories of recurrent innovations as well as the features that have impact on the process of adoption.