The Power of a Mobilized Community  A new book highlights the
role of communities in the diffusion of radical innovations.
Want success for your radical innovation? Think like a community
organizer.  That’s one of the messages of Market Rebels: How
Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations (Princeton
University Press, 2009), a new book by Hayagreeva Rao. In Market
Rebels, Rao, who is the Atholl McBean Professor of
Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Stanford
Graduate School of Business, takes a fascinating look at the
role activist communities can play in the diffusion of radical
innovations. According to Rao, radical innovations often get
accepted—or rejected—when a group mobilizes around a cause it
cares about (which he calls a “hot cause”) through collective
activities that build a sense of community or identity (which he
calls “cool mobilization”).  For example, Rao describes the role
that computer hobbyists and their clubs played in launching a
personal computing movement in the 1960s a