Bridging the Adoption Gap in Primary Sectors: A Systemic Technology Adoption Model

Innovation adoption in primary sectors—agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and aquaculture—is essential for addressing pressing global challenges, including climate change, resource degradation, and food security. However, a persistent gap exists between innovation potential and actual implementation, with many promising technologies failing to achieve widespread adoption despite substantial research investments. This paper presents the Systemic Technology Adoption Model (STAM), a conceptual model that addresses critical gaps in adoption theory by integrating four quadrants: technologies, users, finance, and institutions. STAM explicitly recognizes adoption as a systemic process requiring alignment across multiple dimensions. The model’s distinctive contribution lies in its emphasis on inter-quadrant relationships, revealing how variables across different domains interact, compound, and cascade to create either enabling conditions or barriers. Through a test case, we illustrate how the model can enable practitioners to proactively identify potential adoption barriers early in the innovation development process, revealing when barriers in multiple quadrants compound to create obstacles, when cascade effects amplify constraints across the system, and where strategic interventions can address multiple barriers simultaneously. We discuss theoretical contributions and practical implications for practitioners and policy designers, highlighting how STAM could provide stakeholders with a tool for designing more effective adoption strategies.