This paper extends our previous studies on the assimilation of Internet-based e-business innovations by firms in an international setting. Drawing upon theories on the process and contexts of technology diffusion, we develop an integrative model to examine three assimilation stages: initiation -> adoption -> routinization. The model features technological, organizational, and environmental contexts as prominent antecedents of this three-stage assimilation process. Based on this model, we hypothesize how technology readiness, technology integration, firm size, global scope, managerial obstacles, competition intensity, and regulatory environment influence e-business assimilation at the firm level. A unique data set of 1,857 firms from 10 countries is used to test the conceptual model and hypotheses. To probe deeper into the influence of the environmental context, we compare two subsamples from developed and developing countries. Our empirical analysis leads to several key findings: (1) Competition positively affects initiation and adoption, but negatively impacts routinization, suggesting that too much competition is not necessarily good for technology assimilation because it drives firms to chase the latest technologies without learning how to use existing ones effectively. (2) Large firms tend to enjoy resource advantages at the initiation stage, but have to overcome structural inertia in later stages. (3) We also find that economic environments shape innovation assimilation: Regulatory environment plays a more important role in developing countries than in developed countries. Moreover, while technology readiness is the strongest factor facilitating assimilation in developing countries, technology integration turns out to be the strongest in developed countries, implying that as e-business evolves, the key determinant of its assimilation shifts from accumulation to integration of technologies. Together, these findings offer insights into how innovation assimilation is influenced by contextual factors, and how the effects may vary across different stages and in different environments.technology diffusion, innovation assimilation, assimilation process, e-business, competition, firm size, technology integration, international perspective
Grounded in the diffusion of innovation theory and the technologyorganization-environment framework, we develop an integrative model to study the determinants of post-adoption stages of innovation diffusion, using enterprise digital transformation as an example of technology-enabled innovations. We specify four innovation characteristics (relative advantage, compatibility, costs and security concern) and four contextual factors (technology competence, organization size, competitive pressure and partner readiness) as determinants of post-adoption usage, and postulate usage as an intermediate link to impact on firm performance. We test the proposed model using a dataset of 1415 companies from six European countries. We find that the innovation needs to be used extensively in value-chain activities before its impact can be realized. Among the innovation characteristics, we find that compatibility is the strongest driver, and security concern outweighs cost as a usage inhibitor. Among the contextual variables, technology competence, partner readiness and competitive pressure significantly drive e-business usage, and the structural inertia of large firms tends to slow down its penetration. Collectively, these results indicate that innovation diffusion can be better understood by including both innovation characteristics and contextual factors, whereas earlier literature has traditionally treated the two separately. Finally, we evaluate an international dimension among European countries and tease out important boundary conditions that would not have been evident in a singlecountry dataset. Our results show that careful attention must be paid to the economic and regulatory factors that may result in uneven innovation diffusion even among developed European countries.
This study examines firms' migration across interorganizational systems (IOS) that are built on standards with relatively different degrees of openness. As firms seek to improve inter-firm coordination using adoption, yet the extant literature falls short of empirical testing of the theory. We examine our conceptual model on a large dataset of 1,394 firms. The empirical results demonstrate that network effects are a significant driver of migration to open-standard IOS. We also find that the effect of adoption costs is different for firms that are migrating from EDI (significantly negative) and firms that are not (no effect).While this finding may sound counter-intuitive, it illustrates the subtle role of path dependency in standards migration. Experience with older standards may keep the firm "trapped" and make it difficult to shift to open and potentially better standards. Our work also teases out finer-grained relationships such as the positive impact of trading community on the strength of network effects, and the importance of managerial complexity as a key determinant of adoption costs. Relative to the extant literature, this paper focuses on adoption of an open-standard network with broader impacts on value chain activities (compared to EDI networks), and with a wider scope of partner efforts involved in establishing network effects (compared to systems such as automated teller machine networks). Overall we believe that this study, based on a rigorous empirical analysis of a unique international dataset, provides valuable insights into a set of key factors that influence standards diffusion.
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