In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spreadquickly. Plenty do: think of in-vitro fertilization, genomics, and communications technologies themselves.But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why

Coaxing

The most common approach to changing behavior is to say to people, *Please do X.”

“Diffusion. is essen- tially a social process ‘through which people talking to people spread an. inno- vation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread,

The puzzle is why.

innovations