Geoffrey Moore outlines the following Technology Adoption Strategies and Technology Adoption Life Cycle in his book “Dealing with Darwin”.

Technology adoption life cycle
A model that describes how communities react to the introduction of a discontinuous technology, consisting of a progression through five adoption strategies: technology enthusiast, visionary, pragmatist, conservative, and skeptic.

Techies
An adoption strategy that embraces discontinuous technologies on a personal basis as an opportunity to learn and to participate in the leading edge of technology innovation.

Visionaries
An adoption strategy that works with technology enthusiasts to sponsor first-mover adoption of discontinuous technologies in order to gain a dramatic competitive advantage.

Pragmatists
An adoption strategy that embraces new technologies when its proponents see others like them adopting them, a follow-the-herd approach that is particularly sensitive to word-of-mouth references.

Conservatives
An adoption strategy that embraces new technologies only when they threaten to completely displace older established alternatives.

Sceptics
An adoption strategy that resists the adoption of technologies to the end, believing that the law of unintended consequences will undermine whatever gains they purport to offer.

Early Market
A stage in the technology adoption life cycle during which technology enthusiasts and visionaries sponsor new technologies while the mainstream marketplace watches but does not participate.

Chasm
A stage in the technology adoption life cycle during which the market stagnates for lack of a natural customer constituency to sponsor it. Visionaries who used to sponsor the category have moved on to other interests. Pragmatists are now the desired sponsors, but they do not see enough adoption activity by their peers to be comfortable supporting the new paradigm.

Tornado
A stage in the technology adoption life cycle during which pragmatist customers, spurred by the appearance of a killer app, enter the market in droves, driving demand to exceed supply, creating a frenzy of expansion and a meteoric rise in equity valuations.

Bowling Alley
A stage in the technology adoption life cycle during which technology is being adopted for niche markets but not yet for broad horizontal usage.

Main Street
The last stage of the technology adoption life cycle, coming at the end of the tornado, it signals a rise in the strategic importance of the conservative customer.

Category
A term used by customers to classify what they are buying and distinguish it from other purchasing choices. Emerging categories are typically defined by naming one or more reference competitors. Established categories help analysts follow a market and investors determine their asset allocation strategies.

Category maturity life cycle
A model that describes the rise, duration, and decline of a category of product or service.

Early market
A stage in the technology adoption life cycle during which technology enthusiasts and visionaries sponsor new technologies while the mainstream marketplace watches but does not participate.

Mature market
A period in the development of a market when, setting aside cyclical fluctuations, growth rates are modest, typically less than 10 percent. Strategically, a time when profits take precedence over revenues and market share.

Declining market
A period in the maturity of a market when, setting aside cyclical fluctuations, growth rates are negative. Strategically, a time to either reinvigorate the category or harvest and exit.

Fault line
A transition very late in the category maturity life cycle when a category becomes obsolete by virtue of a discontinuous technology or disruptive innovation entering the tornado.

Different approaches (or vectors) for innovation can be pursued depending on where you are in the category lifecycle. I will discuss this further in a later post.