Why Innovations Fail — The Case of Passive and Active Innovation Resistance

Innovation literature reports high failure rates for innovations, ranging from 50% to 90%. Hence, most new products fail as they are rejected by consumers due to their resistance to innovation, indicating that innovations remain a critical challenge for managers. In order to expand our current knowledge of consumers' new product adoption behaviour, we propose to consider the concepts of passive and active innovation resistance. Within a large scaled empirical study, we show that passive innovation resistance evolves from an individual's resistance to change disposition and status quo satisfaction, while active innovation resistance is primarily driven by product-specific barriers. Our results indicate that both passive and active innovation resistance represent strong inhibitors within new product evaluation, significantly reducing consumers' intention to adopt new products.