General Innovativeness Research Articles

The effects of country and gender differences on consumer innovativeness and decision processes in a highly globalized high‐tech product market

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on two objectives. First, to investigate how two consumer innovativeness measures (domain‐specific innovativeness (DSI) and general innovativeness (GI)) in a highly globalized product market (i.e. laptop computer) are related to two widely used demographics, country and gender. Second, to examine how innovativeness affects a series of consumer decisions such as information search, opinion dependency, and store choice.Design/methodology/approachThe authors build a conceptual model linking two important demographics (i.e. country and gender) and consumer innovativeness (both DSI and GI), and test it using binomial logistic regression, with a sample of 614 respondents from Korea, China, and the USA.FindingsResults are generally consistent with the authors' hypotheses. The two consumer innovativeness measures are significantly influenced by the two demographic factors, and product‐specific innovativeness shows more plausible results than GI. Furthermore, consumers' decision processes were found to have idiosyncratic patterns regarding consumer innovativeness and the two demographic moderators.Research limitations/implicationsThe study may have demographical bias for two reasons: use of only limited metropolitan samples and a somewhat unbalanced sample in gender and occupation.Practical implicationsIn the early stage of new product launch, DSI will be dominantly useful in market segmentation and targeting rather than GI. However, management should not overlook variability of countries and genders since consumers show idiosyncratic patterns in their decision processes.Originality/valueThe paper explores the field of consumer innovativeness studies using comparison of the two dimensions of consumer innovativeness measurements. Also, the study reconfirms the importance of demographics on consumers' decisions in the early stage of highly globalized product markets.

The role of SME entrepreneurs’ innovativeness and personality in the adoption of innovations

Entrepreneurs’ innovativeness and personality play a key role in the adoption of innovations in Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Following two complementary approaches, this study conceptualizes innovativeness at two levels of abstraction: general innovativeness (GI), that is, the degree of openness to newness; and specific innovativeness (SI), that is, the predisposition to be among the firsts to adopt innovations in a specific domain. This study measures GI and SI on a sample of SME entrepreneurs by using two different scales that are based on inventories extensively used in this field (i.e., the KAI [Kirton, J.M., 1976. Adaptors and innovators: a description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology 61 (5), 622–629; Kirton, J.M., 2003. Adaption–Innovation in the Context of Diversity and Change. Routledge, London] and DSI [Goldsmith, R.E., Hofacker, C.F., 1991. Measuring consumer innovativeness. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 19 (3), 209–222] inventories) and tests their effects on the entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt innovations. Secondly, this study relates entrepreneurs’ innovativeness (both GI and SI) to their basic personality traits as assessed through the Five-Factor Model of human personality (cf. [Digman, J.M., 1990. Personality structure: emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology 41 (1), 417–440; McCrae, R.R., John, O.P., 1992. An introduction to the five-factor model and its implications. Journal of Personality 60 (2), 1–26]). Finally, it compares the predictive power of both GI and SI on the entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt innovations against that of a cognitive model that represents the framework of reference in this field (i.e., the Theory of Planned Behavior [Ajzen, I., 1991. The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50 (2), 179–211]). Results suggest a number of implications for entrepreneurs, managers, and policy makers.