Mindfulness and Quality of Innovation in Cloud Computing Adoption

The emergence of cloud computing is quickly redefining the information technology (IT) and business landscape. Cloud computing involves delivery of IT infrastructure, software and platforms as a service to the end users. This IT acquisition model saves organizations from huge capital expenditures on IT and the burden of keeping a huge IT department to provide system support. Cloud computing as an IT innovation is steadily generating a lot of interest within IT innovation researchers and practitioners. Extant research in IT innovation has heavily relied on the dominant paradigm which explains and predicts innovation adoption on the basis of economic-rationalistic models. These models assume a direct relationship between an organization’s innovator profile and the quantity of adoption in terms of earliness, frequency and extent of adoption. Further, they have always assumed a positive relationship between the quantity of innovation and quality of innovation. The advent of radical IT innovations like cloud computing calls for a rethinking of the dominant paradigm in terms of its efficacy in explaining innovative behaviors in organizations. Organizations hoping to adopt cloud computing are in need of a unifying IT innovation model that will help them discern whether, when and how to innovate. That is, they are concerned about the quality of innovation. This study proposes an IT innovation adoption model that incorporates the concept of mindfulness as a moderating factor between quantity of innovation and quality of innovation. The proposed conceptual model is a result of a thorough literature review of the IT innovation adoption research. This study, though conceptual, enriches cloud computing research by proposing an IT innovation model that suits its radical nature compared to other IT innovations. The proposed model once validated will also be of valuable use to practitioners and researchers interested in cloud adoption.