An important perspective on technical change is that of the end-user or consumer of products and services. Technology can be seen as a means of satisfying human needs. This tendency of successful technologies to serve multiple needs contributes to lock-in by making it harder for competing innovations to replace them fully. Hence, many attempts to introduce new energy efficient or alternative fuel technologies, especially in the case of the car, have failed because of a failure to meet all the needs satisfied by the incumbent technology. These associations are likely to be more flexible than the values themselves, and provide a potential source of future changes in technology choice.
Technology diffusion is an integral part of technical change.
Uptake of a technology that is locally new can be viewed as an innovation. Often, when technology is adopted it is also adapted in some way, or used in an original way. Wallace emphasizes the importance of an active and creative absorption process in the country that takes up the new technology. The implication of this complexity is that no general rules define what works. The process of technology adoption is as context dependent as that of the original innovation.