Innate and Domain-Specific Innovativeness: An Empirical Study on Cellular Phone Users

Abstract

Success of new products is one of the main indicators of a firm's profitability. Amount of the demand for new products is related with adoption and spread of innovations. While some individuals have a greater tendency towards adopting new technologies, others follow the innovative individuals in this case. The studies in the literature suggest that consumer innovativeness is related with consumer behavior and characteristics. It is seen that consumer innovativeness is a construct investigated at both innate and domain-specific level. In this study, by discussing the concept of consumer innovativeness at both innate and domain-specific levels, I examined the effects of individual characteristics such as risk taking tendency and self-esteem, and of domain specific characteristics such as opinion leadership, expertise and social identity function on these two levels of innovativeness. For this purpose, the data collected from 626 cellular phone users via questionnaire method has been analyzed by using structural equation modeling technique. The results of the study display the meaningfulness of the factors that are thought to affect both innate and domain-specific innovativeness. In addition, when compared to similar studies in the literature, the model has a higher explanatory power. Particularly, the significant effect of self-esteem on innate innovativeness and the fact that the causality relation between innate innovativeness and domain-specific innovativeness has been investigated together with social identity function can be seen as the original contribution of this study to the literature.