EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

First adoption of consumer innovations: Exploring market failure and alleviating factors

Jeroen P.J. de Jong, Nils Lennart Gillert and Ruth M. Stock

Research Policy, 2018, vol. 47, issue 2, 487-497

Abstract: Consumers innovate usually for non-commercial motives. They generally lack incentives to diffuse, and this is expected to hamper first adoption – even if consumer innovations are valuable to many other people. We confirm this market failure with survey data of 164 German consumer innovators. First adoption by others is unrelated with general use value, unless the innovator is highly willing to commercialize. Next, as classical diffusion theory does not explain when consumer innovations become available to others, we propose an individual-object-process (I-O-P) framework to study factors alleviating the market failure. The viability of the framework is explored by studying the moderating role of entrepreneurial experience (I), product newness (O) and community engagement during the innovation process (P). First adoption of generally valuable consumer innovations is enhanced when a community was involved. We also find tentative evidence for a moderating role of entrepreneurial experience and product newness.

Keywords: Consumer innovation; Free innovation; User innovation; Diffusion; Adoption; Market failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733318300040
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:47:y:2018:i:2:p:487-497

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2018.01.004

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:47:y:2018:i:2:p:487-497