In the early 1920s, the agricultural world was revolutionized by the invention of hybrid seed corn in Ames, Iowa. Hybrid seed allowed farmers to increase their corn crop yields by 20% per acre.^[1] While it was invented in the early 1920s, by the time it became widely used by farmers in Iowa, a decade had passed. It had taken so long for hybrid seed to become widely adopted by Iowa farmers that in the mid-1930s, Dr. Bryce Ryan, a sociologist from Harvard University, came to Iowa to study the why and the what—why it took so long to catch on and what the factors were that eventually caused its widespread adoption.