Culture-Based Adoption: The 2-Step Dance of Driving Innovation

As someone who's spent their entire career on the front lines of business—from large consumer goods companies to now helping drive innovation at a small social media SaaS startup—I’ve always been fascinated by a simple question:

Can bringing new ideas to life be broken down into repeatable principles?

Over time, I’ve come to believe the answer is yes. And through my experiences, I’ve developed a concept I call Culture-Based Adoption—a lens for understanding how to drive meaningful change and adoption, especially inside complex organizations.

What is Culture-Based Adoption?

Put simply, Culture-Based Adoption is the idea that getting people to embrace something new—whether it’s a product, a service, or a process—requires a 2-step dance.

Step 1: Usage

The first step is about getting someone to use something new. This is the tangible interaction—your customer uses your product, your client tests your service, your team adopts a new tool.

It’s the scalable part. Whether you’re launching a new snack in a CPG company or rolling out an analytics tool in a SaaS startup, you need your end user to understand what it is, why it matters, and how to use it.

But that’s only the beginning.

Step 2: Culture

The second step is harder—and it’s the one most businesses underestimate. It’s about changing the culture around the new behavior. Once someone understands and even likes the innovation, you now face a second, deeper question:

Will this require a change in how things are usually done? And will that change be accepted or rejected by the broader culture around it?

Let me give you a concrete example.

A Real-Life Example: The Business Knowledge Graph

Let me bring this closer to home.

At my company, GraphIQ, we’ve built what we believe is the world’s largest business knowledge graph—a marvel of AI that doesn’t always get the spotlight. It's not flashy like the new wave of generative AI models or agents, but it’s deeply powerful. It’s the kind of innovation that sits under the surface, quietly transforming how business research gets done.

What we’ve built is a single platform that stitches together the entire business landscape, enabling users to do research 10x faster than traditional methods. It has the potential to replace multiple tools, eliminate inefficient workflows, and drastically reduce both time and cost. It works globally. It scales beautifully. It saves money. It’s a no-brainer, right?

Well… not so fast.

Because here’s what often happens in reality: people see the tool, they love the interface, they get the vision, they nod in agreement… and then they say something like:

“I don’t have time to use this."

“Can’t I just use ChatGPT?”

Wait—what?

They’re offered the ability to conduct robust, enterprise-grade research in minutes instead of days, with better coverage and more contextual accuracy—yet they default back to slower, more fragmented, more expensive tools.

Why? Because it’s not just about understanding the value of the new tool. It’s about what the tool demands in return: a change in workflow, a shift in behavior, and sometimes a rethinking of how a team or entire org operates.

And that brings us right back to the second step of Culture-Based Adoption. You're not just battling for product comprehension or engagement—you’re battling against the invisible forces of inertia, process, and internal politics.

This is where so many great innovations die—not because they aren’t good enough, but because they require people to operate differently. And changing behavior is hard. Changing culture is even harder.

But it’s not impossible.

So, How Do You Navigate This?

Here are four principles I’ve learned to help guide innovation through the cultural gauntlet:

1. Be Aware

Ask yourself: Is my innovation hard to use? Will it require people to work differently?If the answer is yes, you need a strategy—not just for onboarding users, but for helping them see the why behind the how.

2. Collaborate

Great innovation often starts with no authority, no budget, and no team. Real change only happens with others, not just through them. If you can bring people along slowly, help them co-own the vision, and give them room to shape it—it becomes theirs too. And that’s when change sticks.

3. Build Trust

Don’t oversell. In fact, one of the most powerful things you can do is to be honest about the challenges. Acknowledge what’s hard. Set clear expectations. Share the imperfections. Ironically, this kind of transparency builds more credibility than pretending everything is perfect.

4. Bring Fortitude

Innovation is not for the faint of heart. A good friend once told me, “Innovation isn’t a team sport—it’s a contact sport.” You will meet resistance. You will have to defend your position. And you’ll need grit to keep pushing through the noise.

Final Thought

Driving behavior change is never easy—especially when it means challenging the status quo. But the biggest breakthroughs rarely come without resistance. If you want to truly innovate, don’t just focus on what people need to do—focus on what needs to change around them to make that behavior sustainable.

Because in the end, getting people to do something new isn’t just about usability—it’s about culture.

Let’s dance.