How Formal Institutions Interact with the Organizational Drivers of New Platform Technology Adoption

Abstract

Although there has been a recent surge in research on the drivers of technology adoption, our understanding is still limited to adoption in a single national context. That is, we still lack an understanding of how the effects of micro-level factors on technological adoption depend on differences in national contexts. Attempting to bridge the gap between international business and strategy research, we propose that technology adoption depends on both micro (organizational absorptive capacity and managerial attention) and macro (i.e., formal institutional environment) factors as well as their interplay. The study tests a moderated mediation model on the responses of Ericsson’s clients around the globe (89 telecommunications operators from 79 countries) to the offering of Cloud technology. We find that the influence of organizational absorptive capacity on technology adoption manifests itself partly through managerial attention. We also find that the firm’s absorptive capacity compensates for the regulatory system’s lack of quality for new technology adoption. Besides, the absorptive capacity is particularly important in directing managerial attention to the new technology in countries with a lower quality of regulatory systems.