Consumer Innovativeness and Adoption of Technological Innovation: A Cross Country Study

The current literature suggests that the concept of consumer innovativeness is considered to be universally applicable. Innovators are believed to be novelty seekers and risk takers independently of their national identity, and therefore would be attracted to similar characteristics of an innovation across most countries. Though, research in intercultural marketing has long shown that cultural norms and values produce different effects upon adoption of innovation, which seems to contradict the universal assumption about the nature of the relationship between consumer innovativeness and adoption of innovation. This research attempts to bridge the gap by investigating the effects of consumer innovativeness on adoption of a service-based innovation across three European countries. The results of the multi-group structural equation modeling show that the relationship between consumer innovativeness and adoption of innovation does vary across the three dimensions under study (perceived novelty, perceived value and perceived risk).