CONCEPT
Reinvention (Rogers)
Rogers's hard-won insight that adopters routinely modify innovations to fit their circumstances — and that reinvention is not deviation from proper use but evidence of deep engagement and sustained commitment.
Reinvention is the degree to which an innovation is changed or modified by a user in the process of its adoption and implementation. Early diffusion research treated the innovation as a fixed entity that moved unchanged through a social system; adopters were expected to implement it in its original form, and deviations were regarded as distortions. Rogers came to reject this view. Accumulating evidence showed that adopters who reinvented innovations sustained their adoption longer, derived greater benefits, and integrated the innovation more thoroughly than those who implemented it as designed. Reinvention was not dysfunctional. It was a sign of ownership, engagement, and the adaptive intelligence that effective adoption requires.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Rogers's acceptance of reinvention was a substantial revision of classical diffusion theory. Earlier editions of Diffusion of Innovations treated the innovation as a stable package. The fifth edition makes reinvention central, drawing on research by Ronald Rice, Everett Rogers himself, and others that documented how adopters routinely customized innovations