Forecasting the rate of adoption of new products © Vince Daly & Kingston University, October 2009 This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.Creative Commons
Early adopters Take off Mass adoption Slow down The S-curve shape reflects the stages of market development.
S: market saturation level (i.e. max possible sales) = 100 in this example P t : penetration of market at time t Can be changed by logistic transformation to The S-curve has a complicated formula but a change of variables produces a simple linear equivalent. The non-linear S-curve Its linear transformation
MSc student T. Vrionis gathered the OECD data for % penetration of this market EXCELs TREND function can be used to fit a linear trend to the transformed data by the OLS method, and also to extrapolate this trend. The logistic transformation can then be reversed for a graph that shows observed and extrapolated market penetration. DATA:
Saturation Levels Vary By Segment ADVENTIS PLC have used S-Curve calculations as a basis for forecasting development of various M-commerce markets © Adventis PLC, 2001 Extract from presentation to IBC conference Forecasting the Telecoms Market, London 2001