hybrid corn

“The new drug superseded an existing idea, just as hybrid corn had replaced open-pollinated seed.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“The hybrid corn investigation includes each of the four main elements of diffusion an inno vation, communication channels, time, and the social system that we have just discussed and serves to illustrate these elements.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“When Professor Bryce Ryan, fresh from his Ph.D. studies in sociology at Harvard University, arrived at Iowa State University in 1939, he chose hybrid corn as the innovation of study in his investigation of social factors in economic decisions.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“Although hybrid corn was an innovation with a high degree of relative advantage over the open-pollinated seed that it replaced, the typical farmer moved slowly from awareness-knowledge of the innovation to adoption.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“Neal Gross personally interviewed 345 farmers in the two Iowa communities, but twelve farmers operating less than twenty acres were discarded from the data analysis, as were 74 respondents who had started farming after hybrid corn began to diffuse.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“Even though most innovative adopters of gammanym and hybrid corn were fully informed of the scientific evaluations that had been made of these new ideas, this information did not reduce their uncertainty about how the innovation would work out for them.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“The hybrid corn diffusion study by Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross (1943), described in Chapter 1, set forth the basic paradigm for studying diffusion; it was soon followed by an increasing number of scholars in many disciplines (Figure 2–1).”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

“The adoption of hybrid corn meant that an Iowa farmer had to make important changes in his corn-growing behavior.”

Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations