Lime, Bird or Campus Drive? Where Institutions Can Be Ahead of Markets: An Empirical Study About Consumers’ Intention to Use Closed-Campus Micromobility: An Abstract

Abstract

Shared micromobility is an innovative way of urban transportation that provides low-emission short-distance travel options and can reduce reliance on private vehicles, especially in urban areas. However, publicly available solutions (e.g., Lime or Bird) show several disadvantages such as random parked vehicles on sidewalks, risky riding behavior and vandalism, as consumers often feel anonymous and unaccountable. Closed-campus solutions are deployed in limited areas such as university or office campuses, only available to the respective campus community, and one promising way to overcome issues of publicly available solutions. Our article is the first to analyze user acceptance of closed-campus micromobility innovations. Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2; Venkatesh et al., 2012), we considered how constructs from consumer’s perceived value theory (Zeithaml, 1988; Holbrook, 1994) and employee enablement theory (Adler & Borys, 1996; Permana et al., 2015) influence behavioral intention, which in turn influence real use and organizational identification (social identity theory; Ashforth & Mael, 1989). To test our framework, we use partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS) and survey as well as real-world usage data from DHBW Drive, a field laboratory for micromobility at Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in Stuttgart, Germany. DHBW Drive is the first successfully implemented micromobility sharing system in a closed-campus organizational environment of a German university. In total, 70 e-scooters were available which could be rented by university members (7000 students and 400 staff) via a mobile app. During the first data collection, October 2020 to February 2021, more than 1200 students were registered, over 2000 bookings were made, and a total of about 9000 km were traveled. First, our results reveal that perceived job enablement, hedonic, utilitarian, economic and environmental benefits, and performance expectancy all have a strong influence on behavioral intention to use a closed-campus micromobility service. Second, and thanks to real-world usage data, we demonstrate that actual real-world usage of a closed-campus micromobility is significantly influenced by behavioral intention to use, which reinforces the relevance of usage data in technology acceptance research. Third, we introduce another endogenous variable, which is specific to the organizational context and is influenced by behavioral intention: organizational identification. We show that such services offer benefits not only for users, but also for the relationship with organizations. This is indeed a new and promising perspective for technology adoption models in organizational environments.