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A socio-cognitive analysis of innovation diffusion: Interventionism and substantiveness

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  • Lai, Jiun-Yan
  • Hung, Shih-Chang

Abstract

This paper examines the early stage of innovation diffusion from a socio-cognitive perspective. Innovation diffusion is viewed as a social process, characterized by evolving categories and associated labels that account for how and why an innovation is adopted or rejected. Empirically, we study mobile payments in Taiwan using a combination of the topic modeling approach and narrative analysis to uncover keywords and topics (categories) in a large number of newspaper articles from 2012 to 2018 (N = 1376), collected from the United Daily News database. We identify 14 latent topics, which could be grouped into two higher-order categories based on the distinctiveness of their evolving patterns and the coherence of their keywords: interventionism and substantiveness. We also highlight that the early diffusion begins with interventionism and proceeds to substantiveness.

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  • Lai, Jiun-Yan & Hung, Shih-Chang, 2025. "A socio-cognitive analysis of innovation diffusion: Interventionism and substantiveness," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 210(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:210:y:2025:i:c:s0040162524006450
    DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123847
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