In a recent article published by the American Physical Society a study was performed that may help us further understand the best ways in which to influence knowledge societies. According to a study done by Northwestern University, adoption of innovations, whether new ideas, technologies, or products, is crucially important to these knowledge societies.
In this particular study the focus was on critical care physicians and their adoption of new techniques and products in medical practices. However, this study is relevant to all fields of industry that rely on some sort of persuasion model.
The study involved promoting the adoption of a new assay which marks bacterial infections. The advantage of using this assay over the standard method is phenomenal in that it yields results 20 times faster than standard microbial cultures. Out of 36 total physicians in the study, only two were aware of the new procedure. Interestingly, the spread of adoption among the physicians in the study over a 244 day period produced 20 adopters of the new assay. That's a 56% conversion in under a years time.
What method of adoption in this case was most effective? Remarkably, the most productive way of breaking through the hard set habits of old methods and procedures is to utilize the persuasion model versus the contagion model. More practically, the study found the art of persuasion was more effective at boosting adoption. The trick was finding the sweet spot in frequency and tone of the persuasive messages so they're effective but not off-putting. The sweet spot for reminders? Every five to seven days and delivered as strong suggestions.
“While our study is focused on critical care physicians, our findings are relevant for other settings in education, research, and business where small groups of highly qualified peers make decisions about the adoption of innovations whose utility is difficult if not impossible to gauge,” says senior author Luis Amaral, professor of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and a professor of medicine at Feinberg.
Here at Biotechnology Calendar, Inc. we are actively producing trade shows that allow for innovative life science product representatives to interact with top level researchers and principal investigators in a professional environment to help promote new products and best practices in those bioresearch fields. In 2015 we will have over 60 shows nationwide at top funded research universities. These face to face interactions are a perfect conduit for researchers to take a break for lunch and discover new innovations in the world of life science products. And with free lunch, door prizes, and drawings, who could pass up a fun interactive environment that we provide. In this way we are able to pull those decision makers out of their labs and over to your booth to learn about your products and services. If you would like to join us in 2015 click the button below. Thanks for reading.
@{PhysRevX.4.041008,title = {Adoption of a High-Impact Innovation in a Homogeneous Population},author = {Weiss, Curtis H. and Poncela-Casasnovas, Julia and Glaser, Joshua I. and Pah, Adam R. and Persell, Stephen D. and Baker, David W. and Wunderink, Richard G. and Nunes Amaral, Lu\'\is A.},journal = {Phys. Rev. X},volume = {4},issue = {4},pages = {041008},numpages = {11},year = {2014},month = {Oct},publisher = {American Physical Society},doi = {10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041008},url = {http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041008}
