Readiness Levels

Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory

For the purposes of the Policy Readiness Tool, Rogers’ five adopter categories were collapsed into three. This was done to ease applicability in the field and to help ensure that the Policy Readiness Tool is straightforward to use, easy to implement, and that users can apply it to a variety of policy situations.

Rogers’ original five adopter categories include: (1) Innovators, (2) early adopters, (3) early Majority, (4) late Majority, and (5) laggards. (Table 1 provides a detailed description of these adopter categories.) Whether a community or organization is an early adopter versus a Late Adopter can be determined by examining the rate of adoption of policies over time, which tends to follow an S-shaped diffusion curve (see Figure 1).