CONCEPT
Consequences of Innovation
Rogers's framework for what adoption actually does — classified along three axes (desirable/undesirable, direct/indirect, anticipated/unanticipated) — and the corrective to diffusion research's pro-innovation bias.
Consequences are the changes that occur to an individual or social system as a result of adopting or rejecting an innovation. Rogers devoted the final major section of Diffusion of Innovations to this topic, which most innovation researchers had ignored entirely. He classified consequences along three dimensions: desirable vs. undesirable, direct vs. indirect, and anticipated vs. unanticipated. The most problematic consequences tend to be those that are undesirable, indirect, and unanticipated — consequences that arise from the interaction between innovation and social system in ways no one foresaw, that produce harm rather than benefit, and that become visible only after adoption has advanced too far to be reversed. Rogers insisted that studying consequences is essential to honest diffusion research, not an afterthought.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The three-axis framework generates eight possible combinations of consequence type. Research and discourse disproportionately focus on one cell: desirable, direct, anticipated. These are the consequences developers intend, change agents emphasize, and early adopters celebrate. They are real and significant