It was a long time before I identified the adoption cycle, you know - innovator, early adopter etc etc all the way down to laggard.
I didn’t think that being one of the first people I met to have an iPhone 3 was early adoption, but it was. I didn’t imagine that setting up an NHS specialist dental business based around Mac laptop computers was early adoption, but it was. I didn’t see investing in Sirona, CEREC and the CBCT system to provide chair side guided surgery was early adoption but it definitely, definitely was. To me all of these things felt like I was behind the curve and was running to catch up. Looking back though, I adopt early, that’s what I do. I don’t know why that happens and it isn’t something that I consciously choose, it’s just the path that my life has taken and it isn’t necessarily a good thing
For the record, early adoption often makes no financial sense. Early adopters adopt early because it’s exciting, not because it’s profitable. They invest time and money in new technologies or techniques because they’re interested and they think ultimately it will be better but rarely look at it as a financial gain.
If you take the CEREC guided surgery and implant facilities as an example – I have been able to demonstrate in countless places the excellent return on investment for the technology that I adopted but I’ve never measured that against how much money I would have made if I hadn’t adopted it and ran with the old system. In truth, and at least for a reasonable period of time, it would have made much more financial sense not to adopt, not to spend £150,000 or more on a CEREC system and a new CBCT when I had one that worked just fine thanks very much! It would have made no sense to invest the hours, both with patients and without, trying to figure the system out to work within our own environment. It wouldn’t have actually made any sense to lecture about it, it would have made much more sense to stay in the practice and fire implants at people the way I’d always done.
It made no sense having an iPhone 3. My mobile phone at the time worked fine, I could text and call and I didn’t actually need a ‘super computer’ in my pocket, I don’t need one now!
Early adopters adopt out of a deep psychological need to start something new time and time again. They pave the way for the early and late majorities to pick up the procedures or the techniques or the technology that they’ve already tried, debugged and tested but by that stage they’re onto something else which is even less economically viable than the thing they started before.
Blog Post Number:1159
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