The early adoption of electric light Though popular history points to 1882 as the year the light bulb was invented, the basic technology had existed for almost a century. Prior to 1882, Edison himself ran the Edison Isolated Electric Company, which provided the homes of wealthy innovators with electricity and light from a proprietary on-site generation system. The reason we actually remember 1882 is because it represents the moment when Edison managed to push the unproven ideas of electric power and light along the adoption curve to the early majority.

Edison’s initial electric lights were technologically unimpressive, casting 13 watts of light, imperceptibly brighter than the 12-watt gas lamps he sought to replace. And from a design standpoint, the new electric lamps looked almost exactly like those same gas lamps. Yet it’s the very ordinariness of Edison’s design that ensured its success. The simple design represented a sublime design strategy, one that reflected a decision to curate the technology and thus meet the needs of early adopters. Designing a product that matches the way people already think about a need, and then dramatizing a few key features that distinguish the new from the old, helps get early adopters on board with an idea. Since gas lamps were the dominant solution to the need to light up the inside of a building, Edison designed his electric lights to look and operate almost identically. While the specific solution of a light bulb powered by a centralized power source was unfamiliar to most people, virtually everyone living in New York in 1882 would have been able to explain the benefits of interior illumination. The technology was new, but the form and function were decades old.

Edison’s strategy for rolling out electric light was tailored to fit the way people of the era thought about interior illumination in terms of the design, as well as the function, of his initial light bulbs. It can also be seen in the opportunity for integration he noticed when determining how to wire homes for electric power. Recognizing that many commercial and residential landowners in New York had invested considerable capital in gas infrastructure to light their buildings, Edison chose to run his first electrical wires through existing gas lines, fitting directly into the system people already understood for the delivery of light. This sped adoption and cut infrastructure costs.

Edison also publicly endorsed the technology’s possible benefits through the location of his first customers—financial institutions in lower Manhattan. Seeing the windows of the financial district aglow by night dramatized the technology to the metro population living across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Telling his story on the scale of a city skyline, Edison reached a large audience of early adopters, who then shared the idea with their local communities. By making deliberate design choices, Edison curated his radical innovation by designing it to resemble and function like existing offers, integrated the larger solution by leveraging existing infrastructure associated with the need, and endorsed the use of the technology by demonstrating its use in a visible location that had tremendous influence on the rest of the country.

Six strategies for technology adoption Like Edison, firms interested in commercializing a new idea can use an appropriate design strategy to promote its adoption. Though Edison provides an excellent case study for how to drive a new idea from early adopters to the early majority, other design strategies can drive further adoption at any phase of a new idea’s diffusion. Depending on the situation, a company may choose to:

1. Endorse: Explain the benefits and function of a nascent technology to the world.
2. Curate: Create icons that are selective in their functionality.
3. Integrate: Provide solutions that fit into people’s lives.
4. Economize: Drastically cut costs of production on already successful technologies.
5. Play: Find new ways to add value that don’t depend on technical differentiation.
6. Refresh: Reinvent existing offerings and renew technical differentiation to reach new markets.

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