Organizational adoption and assimilation of complex technological innovations

This paper explores the applicability of traditional innovation adoption and diffusion models to contingent, authority innovation processes occurring within an organizational context (Zaltman, Duncan that is, when employees in organizations adopt an innovation that has been chosen by an authority figure. This paper identifies existing gaps in traditional innovation adoption models and concludes that a new framework is required --- one that incorporates the unique processes and factors related to organizational adoption and assimilation of innovations. A new hybrid theoretical framework is developed which combines insights from organizational-level research on technology implementation (Cooper Orlikowski, 1993) with constructs from traditional innovation adoption models (Rogers, 1983; Prescott & Conger, 1995). The resulting theory is a hybrid process/variance theory, which captures both implementation events and the factors that influence them (Shaw & Jarvenpaa, 1997). Data from a longitudinal case study of a firm that implemented client/server development are used to illustrate the framework and to develop propositions for future research.