Diffusion of an Innovation: Lessons from the Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange

WICHE’s Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange (MLDE) facilitates data sharing between states from K-12 education, higher education, and labor agencies. For the past several years, WICHE has retained the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey to conduct an evaluation of the development and deployment of the MLDE.  This brief, one of a series written by EERC, explores the question “why do some innovations in policy or practice take off, while others fizzle out?” through the lens of the MLDE. Social scientists and policy experts have grappled with this question for decades, studying the diffusion of new ideas and examining how and why states, organizations, and institutions adopt innovations to their policies or practices.