Diffusion of innovation/ special issue on time dimension

Hi all!

My name is Moritz and I am studying Agricultural Economics on Masters level. At the moment I am working on an agent-based model about successful innovation diffusion in social networks (using NetLogo). The main idea is to model social learning among farmers and thus, the agents’ decision to adopt an innovation mainly depends on his personal network. Beside the network related arguments about social learning, I would like to implement a time dimension, for example the longer the neighbors of an agent use the innovation successfully, the more likely the agent will adopt the innovation as well. But this is exactly the point where I am stuck right at the moment.
My goal is to implement the following argument:

I would like to implement a turtles-own variable that count ticks as long as the agent uses the innovation (or in other words, as long as the agent is colored red). Does the agent discard the innovation, the counter is restetted to 0. For example: Agent A uses the innovation for 5 periods, his personal variable time-adopted is equal to 5. The next period this variable is updated to 6 if he still use the innovation.
In a second precedure each agent should check how long his neighbors use the innovation (in terms of “check time-adopted of neighbors”). The agent will then implement these values into his personal utility function which determines if he adopts the innovation or not.
Especially the second precure I don’t really know how to ask link-neighbors for the time-adopted value and how to sum them up in the agents’ utiliy function.

Many many thanks for your help and advice and I am really looking forward to your comments. If needed I can provide the NetLogo code.

Kind regards,

Moritz