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The purpose of this study is to propose a systematic method for the diffusion of forecasting technology in the pre‐launch stage.

The authors designed survey question items that are familiar to interviewees as well as algebraically transformable into the parameters of a logistic diffusion model. In addition, they developed a procedure that reduces inconsistency in interviewee responses, removes outliers, and verifies conformability, in order to reduce the error and yield robust estimation results.

The results show that the authors' method performed better in the empirical cases of digital media broadcasting and internet protocol television in terms of sum of squared error compared with an existing survey‐based method, a regression method, and the guessing‐by‐analogy method. Specifically, the authors' method can reduce the error by using the conformability and outlier tests, while the consistency factor contributes to determining the final estimate with personal estimates.

The procedure proposed in this study is confined to the presented logistic model. Future research should aim to extend its application to other representative diffusion models such as the Bass model and the Gompertz model.

The authors' method provides a better quality of forecasting for innovative new products and services compared with the guessing‐by‐analogy method, and it contributes to managerial decisions such as those in production planning.

The authors introduce the concepts of conformability and consistency in order to reduce the error from personal biases and mistakes. Based on these concepts, they develop a procedure to yield robust estimation results with less error.

The aim of this study is to find out the effect of pricing on the diffusion of cellular subscriptions in Finland. There is a lack of studies on the effect of (telecommunications) service pricing on its diffusion. In the present study, a modified logistic model is applied for estimating the impact of price on the diffusion. The effect of cellular tariffs and cellular phone prices on the market potential and the diffusion rate are evaluated. Whereas almost all previous studies focusing on durables suggest that price affects either the market potential or the diffusion rate, the results of this study indicate that cellular call tariffs and cellular phone prices are not significant predictors of diffusion of cellular subscriptions. It is thus concluded that the logistic diffusion model might implicitly capture the somewhat constant price decline of cellular communications.

Production operations managers have long been concerned about new product development and the life cycle of these products. Because many products do not sell at constant levels throughout their lives, product life cycles (PLCs) must be considered when developing sales forecasts. Innovation diffusion models have successfully been employed to investigate the rate at which goods and/or services pass through the PLC. This research investigates innovation diffusion models and their relation to the PLC. The model is developed and then tested using modem sales from June 1994 to May 2006.

This paper aims to develop a parsimonious and innovative model that captures the dynamics of new product diffusion in the recent high-technology markets and thus assist both academicians and practitioners who are eager to understand the diffusion phenomena. Accordingly, this study develops a novel diffusion model to forecast the demand by centering on the dynamic state of the product’s adoption rate. The proposed study also integrates the consumer’s psychological point of view on price change and goodwill of the innovation in the diffusion process.

In this study, a two-dimensional distribution function has been derived using Cobb–Douglas’s production function to combine the effect of price change and continuation time (goodwill) of the technology in the market. Focused on the realistic scenario of sales growth, the model also assimilates the time-to-time variation in the adoption rate (hazard rate) of the innovation owing to companies changing marketing and pricing strategies. The time-instance upon which the adoption rate alters is termed as change-point.

For validation purpose, the developed model is fitted on the actual sales and price data set of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) semiconductors, liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors and room air-conditioners using non-linear least squares estimation procedure. The results indicate that the proposed model has better forecasting efficiency than the conventional diffusion models.

The developed model is intrinsically restricted to a single generation diffusion process. However, technological innovations appear in generations. Therefore, this study also yields additional plausible directions for future analysis by extending the diffusion process in a multi-generational environment.

This study aims to assist marketing managers in determining the long-term performance of the technology innovation and examine the influence of fluctuating price on product demand. Besides, it also incorporates the dynamic tendency of adoption rate in modeling the diffusion process of technological innovations. This will support the managers in understanding the practical implications of different marketing and promotional strategies on the adoption rate.

This is the first attempt to study the value-based diffusion model that includes key interactions between goodwill of the innovation, price dynamics and change-point for anticipating the sales behavior of technological products.

The number of wine tourists in Chile is still small even though investment in infrastructure, like cellars and wine routes, has been made in the last five years. A question is important to be answered at this point: is there a market for wine tourism in Chile, did the industry overestimate its potential? The lack of historical data impedes an evaluation of these questions. The purpose of this paper is to forecast the size of the local wine tourists market in Chile and provide with recommendations to its development.

The paper consists of the application of a diffusion model to forecast development paths for Chilean wine tourism market. The model is populated with information obtained through surveys to those demographic segments identified as more closely involved with wine tourism based in Charters and Ali‐Knight.

Chilean wine industry has been developing its infrastructure in wine tourism for a number of years, but the number of wine tourists is still very low. Behavioral factors like local consumers' behavior, especially the high level of forgetting (an average wine visitor will perform only one visit to a winery) that reduces the effect of word‐of‐mouth, hinders the development of wine tourists. Wineries should aim to maintain a constant level of awareness among wine tourists in order to obtain repeated visits and encourage word‐of‐mouth as suggested in Dodd.

Forecasting models depend on the variables employed. Consequently the results are affected by the certainty of the values of the variables, as well as their level of exactness. Even though surveys are employed to obtain the values of the variables for the model, there are no historical data to validate the results.

The paper presents a forecasting model to identify the development of wine tourism instead of only reporting actual or past results. Therefore, the paper adopts a forward‐looking perspective for analyzing wine tourism market size differently than previous approaches (see Mitchell and Hall for a review). The model also supports policy recommendations.

This study investigated four different economic level areas of China (Shanghai, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Guizhou) to analyze the eastern and western urban and rural media service status at different development stages. This set of data comes from the comparison of regional urban and rural areas and indicates the various aspects of differences in the survey area, including the media use habits, media resources, media consumer demand, evaluation of media services, the role of media in public life, public knowledge level, and so on. On analyzing data comprehensively, one thing can be found that there is a positive correlation between the public media contact degree and the public knowledge level. The media plays an extremely important role in public life and regional public knowledge gap between urban and rural areas exists. Furthermore, this gap is positively correlated to the media resources and media exposure. The trend of media using on mobile phone and computer in urban areas increases significantly greater than in rural areas. Then, how to narrow the urban–rural and regional public knowledge gap and reduce the negative impact of the digital divide will be an important urgent task.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the diffusion patterns of knowledge in inspiring technological innovations and to enable monitoring development trends of technological innovations based on patent data analysis, thus, to manage knowledge wisely to innovate.

The notion of knowledge innovation potential (KIP) is proposed to measure the innovativeness of knowledge by the cumulative number of patents originated from its inspiration. KIP calculating formula is regressed in forms of two specific diffusion models by conducting a series of empirical studies with the patent-based indicators involving forward and backward citation numbers to reveal knowledge managing strategies regarding innovative activities.

Two specific diffusion models for regressing KIP formula are compared by empirical studies with the result indicating the Gompertz model has higher accuracy than the Logistic model to describe the developing curve of technological innovations. Moreover, the analysis of patent-based indicators over diffusion stages also revealed that patents applied at earlier diffusion stages normally has higher forward citation numbers indicating higher innovativeness meanwhile the patents applied at the latter stages usually requiring more knowledge inflows observed by their larger non-patent citation and backward citation amounts.

Although there is a large body of literature concerning knowledge-based technological innovation, there still room for discussing the mechanism of how knowledge diffuses and inspired knowledge. To the best of authors' knowledge, this study is the first attempt to quantitate the innovativeness of knowledge in technological innovation from the knowledge diffusion perspective with findings to support rational knowledge management related to innovation activities.

In an economic environment characterized in recent years by globalization and the integration of economic processes, standardization in management systems has had a high growth. In this context, there has been a remarkable increase in certain standards, or norms, issued by international organizations. Among these standards, two main groups stand out, both issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO): one for quality management systems – the family of ISO 9000 standards – and the other for environmental management systems – the ISO 14000 standards. This paper aims to analyze the world wide diffusion process of these two standards, using data provided by the ISO itself.

The methodology proposed is developed in four separate phases. The first two analyze the diffusion model over time with a model based on the logistic curve proposed by Franceschini et al. The next two phases analyze whether the diffusion process has proceeded in a relatively homogeneous way in the different sectors of activity. In order to do that, the use of indices of concentration and instability has been carried out.

The conclusion is that the diffusion of both standards is very similar – in general and in terms of the different sectors. This result coincides with certain hypotheses formulated in the theoretical literature.

This is the first paper where it can be demonstrated that, world‐wide, both the ISO 14000 and the ISO 9000 standards have followed very similar patterns of diffusion in their expansion.

The purpose of this paper is to dissect the diffusion of the number of organizations that implemented multiple management systems (MSs), considering the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 standards (quality, environment and safety) in the South European countries: Italy, Portugal and Spain. In addition, based on the data collected, forecasting models were developed to assess at which extent the multiple certifications are expected to occur in each studied country.

Data concerning the evolution of the amount of multiple MSs in Italy, Portugal and Spain were collected for the period between 1999 and 2015. The behavior of the evolution of the number of MSs over the years was studied adopting both the Gompertz and the Logistic models. The results obtained with these two models were compared and analyzed to provide a forecast for the next years.

The diffusion throughout the years of the number of MSs presents an S-shaped behavior. The evolution of the amount of MSs in countries with a lower saturation level are properly fitted by the Gompertz model whereas the Logistic model fits more accurately when considering countries with a larger saturation level.

The data related to the early years are not available in some of the countries. To overcome this shortcoming missing data were extrapolated from the data set provided by the annual ISO survey. Additionally, the integration level attained by each company was not assessed and, on this regard and in the scope of this paper, an integrated management system is understood as implemented when organizations have multiple MSs implemented.

The results provide a cross-sectional portrayal of the diffusion of MSs certifications in the South European countries and enable a forecast for the trend in the next years.

This study aims for the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to analyze the diffusion of multiple MSs throughout the years.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the world‐wide diffusion, according to industrial sectors of activity, of the ISO 9000 family of quality standards.

Using data provided by the ISO itself, the evolution of the world‐wide diffusion of the ISO 9000 family of standards from 1998 to 2008 is studied. Using two indices of instability, these data are then analysed in terms of individual industrial sectors to assess the heterogeneity of diffusion across different sectors of activity.

The results show that the diffusion of ISO 9001 follows a logistic curve in all sectors, although the current stage of diffusion (in terms of initial stage, expansion stage, and saturation stage) differs between different sectors of activity. The sectors have been classified into three groups according to their possible future evolution.

Because the analysis of prediction is based on mathematical models, the validity of the data is crucial. Two weaknesses are detected in the data: the number of certificates during the transition period 2001‐2003; and the number of certificates in 2008. However, both weaknesses are overcome in the paper.

The paper presents the first study of the heterogeneous diffusion pattern of ISO 9001 in different sectors of activity.