"Diffusion of Innovation” Applied to Modeling & Simulation – What can we Learn from Social Science Research and Marketing?

This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

In many industries and companies, Modeling and Simulation has been used successfully for important decisions and even some work process changes. However, in many places the use is quite “shallow” and limited to a small number of highly capable and motivated individuals. It has not become “mainstream” outside of few industries such as Automotive, Aerospace and a few others. This is classic case of an innovation being embraced by “early adopters”, but not by the so-called “early majority” and “late majority” (the vast majority of our employees). In the presentation I will show the analogy to other innovations and propose how we might learn from the classic “Diffusion of Innovation” approaches to enable much broader use of simulation tools to change the way science and engineering is done.