Methodology for monitoring the difusion of innovation in scientific communication channels

Abstract

Introduction: the diffusion of innovations of products or technologies relies on the use of different communication channels. The adaptations or improvements derived from the innovations spread among the participants of these channels and may be aggregated in categories according four conditions of adoption (existent, proactive, aspirational, reactive). Monitoring and visualization of such conditions would help to explore the innovation´s state of the art which can be periodically tracked or envisioned based on specific geographical scope and applied to a specific or multiple channels.
Objectives: presents a methodological proposal to monitor the diffusion of innovation and its conditions of adoption in scientific communication channels.
Methodology: describes the main elements of the Diffusion of Innovations Theory and its derived conceptual model. The methodology proposed has two sequential phases tested on corpora of documents presented at national and international events related to the Open Journal System platform.
Results: applied to the test environment the proposed methodology led to the creation of twenty-nine categories related to the conditions of adoption of innovation.  UCINET 6.434 and Netdraw were used to manipulate three correlation matrices and generate charts. The following analysis was based on multidimensional scaling (MDS) and absolute frequencies.
Conclusions: the methodology was validated the in the test environment, with some remarks about the steps and data analysis. If done regularly, it could be possible to identify trends or predict the innovation adoption as a core task of the monitoring process.