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Innovation-decision process begins with knowledge stage, which commences when the farmer is exposed to the innovation’s existence and gains some understanding of how it functions. Knowledge function is mainly cognitive or knowing. Knowledge seeking is initiated by an individual and is greatly influenced by one’s predispositions. Generally, individuals tend to expose themselves to choose ideas which are in accord with their interests, needs, or existing attitudes. The tendency is called “Selective exposure”.
A need is a state of dissatisfaction or frustration that occurs when one’s desires outweigh one’s actualities. An individual may develop a need when he learnt that an improved method, an innovation, exists. Therefore, innovations can lead to needs, as well as vice versa. Some change agents use this approach to change by creating needs among their clients through pointing out the desirable consequences of new idea. Thus, knowledge of innovations can create motivation for their adoption.
Questions such as ‘what is the innovation?’ ‘How does it work?’ and ‘Why does it work?’ are the main concerns of an individual about an innovation. The first of these three types of knowledge, awareness-knowledge, is information that an innovation exists. Awareness-knowledge then motivates an individual to seek ‘how-to-knowledge and ‘principles’ knowledge. This type of information-seeking is concentrated at the knowledge stage, but it may also occur at the persuasion and decision stages.
Most of the extension officers seem to concentrate their efforts on creating awareness knowledge, although this goal can be achieved more efficiently in many client systems by mass media channels. Extension officers/change agents could perhaps play their most distinctive and important role in the innovation-decision process if they concentrate on “how-to-knowledge, which is probably most essential to clients at the trial and decision function in the process. Most extension workers perceive that creation of principle-knowledge is outside the purview of their responsibilities and is a more appropriate task for formal schooling and general education Knowing about an innovation is often quite a different matter from using the idea. Most individuals know about many innovations which they have not adopted. Why? One reason is because the individual knows about the new idea but does not regard it as relevant to his situation, as potentially useful. Therefore, attitudes toward an innovation frequently intervene between the knowledge and decision functions. In other words, the individual’s attitudes or beliefs about the innovation have much to say about his passage through the decision process. Consideration of a new idea does not pass beyond the knowledge function if the individual does not define the information as relevant to him or if he does not seek sufficient knowledge to become adequately informed so that persuasion can take place.
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