Despite extensive studies on diffusion of innovations, our knowledge about the reverse process—abandonment of innovations—remains limited. Here, we analyze two large-scale datasets, each capturing detailed socio-temporal patterns that trace the full lifecycle of innovations. By analyzing 2.5M scientists engaging research in 2651 scientific fields and 3.5M individuals using 994 mobile handsets, we find that, in contrast to the Poissonian dynamics commonly assumed in the abandoning process, the abandoning probability increases with the number of past abandonments, suggesting a bandwagon effect characterizing the abandonment of innovations.
We examine the social networks underneath the two systems through co-authorships and mobile communication records, finding that a preferential abandonment mechanism at a network level is responsible for generating the observed effect. Most importantly, we show analytically that the presence of preferential abandonment induces a structural collapse in the topology of the system, where networked systems that were thought to be robust undergo a novel phase transition. We test the theoretical predictions systematically in our datasets, obtaining broadly consistent empirical support. Together these results demonstrate that the collapse of real systems follows reproducible but fundamentally different dynamics than what traditional theoretical frameworks predicted.
Our findings suggest that preferential abandonment and the structural collapse it induces may be a generic property that prevails in the declining phase of the innovation lifecycle.