Engineering discipline requires professionals who accept challenges and enjoy the journey of facing problems and providing solutions.
While some are born with the fighting spirit, many of us are not used to it due to our upbringing and our overprotective care and schooling during the formative years of our education.
Suddenly, when we face the real world and the challenges it throws at us, most of us are unprepared or underprepared.
College phase and its long 4 year span is the most ideal one to overcome these fault lines that are preventing us from becoming thorough professionals.
A class of 50/60 is a heterogeneous group in the current set up with students coming from different backgrounds.
In any such group there will be : innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards.
Question : What type of behavior is expected from engineers ?
Every class needs its innovators to push the class forward with new ideas and enterprise.
Below is an excerpt from Marketing : Consumer Behavior: Diffusion of innovation
I modified it to relate to students in a class as Engineering Education : Students : Diffusion of ideas
As students are also consumers in a limited sense, I hope you will be learning something out of this well establishes theory in consumer psychology.
I also provide a video link for authenticity.
The Five Classes of Students (Consumers)
Click here to watch a video on diffusion of innovation theory
These five different types of students will all react differently to a new idea. Each student group will adopt the new idea at different times and for different reasons. The five types of students (consumers) are:Innovators - Venturesome; although they make up a very small part of the total class(market), innovators play a very important role. They are interested in anything new, and are quick to adopt new and innovative ideas / products. Innovators know about the idea months before it is introduced and pay a high effort/price to be among the first to have this new idea/product.
Early adopters - Young and restless; early adopters are opinion leaders. They pay attention to what the innovators have discovered and find a practical use for the innovation. They then communicate to their followers the usefulness of the new product. They play a very important role by influencing the attitude and changing the behavior of the later adopters. An early adopter who likes the idea / product and adopt it to address their needs. They tel all their colleagues how much easier and faster they could work by adopting the new idea/product.
Early majority - Value buyers; the early majority carefully observe the early adopters, but wait to adopt innovative ideas/products until they are sure they will get value from them. The early majority will only adopt a new idea/product if they are sure that it will provide usefulness to their lives - and not be a waste of their time and money. They wait long enough to learn how the idea/product benefits them before adopting.
Late majority - Skeptics; the late majority wait until an innovation has been accepted by a majority of consumers and the effort has dropped to adopt the new idea/product. The late majority typically adopt innovative products because they feel as if everyone else is doing it. They are the ones who wait till almost everyone else bought the idea.
Laggards - Traditionalists; laggards are the very last group to adopt a new idea/product. Laggards are content with what they have, and they adopt new ideas/products unenthusiastically and only because they feel as if they have to. When the organisation or government mandates that it is compulsory will they do it. Because they have been forced to do so, laggards will then adopt the new product.
