Organizational Adoption of Innovation: Identifying Factors that Influence RFID Adoption in the Healthcare Industry

In this paper, we endeavor to make two specific contributions to research on the adoption of innovations. First, we propose a typology of innovations and suggest that theory-driven adoption research should strive to match innovation types with theories that have related explanatory emphases. We propose this overarching framework for innovation adoption research because different innovations have different characteristics, and thus, it seems unlikely that a single theoretical explanation can be developed to describe the adoption and diffusion of all types of innovations. Second, we develop a model that identifies the factors that influence the adoption of one particular type of innovation: RFID. Our research model is built upon the Technology – Organization – Environment (TOE) theoretical framework, and is tested using PLS on a dataset of US firms (N = 168). We also highlight an interesting empirical result that indicates that while researchers have generally argued that dissatisfaction with existing information systems drives adoption of new systems, in some cases it is satisfaction that drives the adoption of new systems.