Where does personal innovativeness collide?

The willingness of an individual to try out any new information technology, a stable, IT-specific trait that Agarwal and Prasad proposed in 1998 as personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology. They defined it as a symbolic, disposition-level individual difference: a person high in PIIT forms more positive perceptions of a new system and adopts it sooner, and the construct is theorised to moderate the antecedents and the consequences of technology acceptance rather than to drive adoption on its own. Measured by four Likert items, it is deliberately global within the IT domain, an innate readiness to experiment that is meant to hold independently of any one system. This is the referent trait: the marketing and diffusion meanings on this map are the same disposition read at a different level or against a different criterion.[1]

Unit

A person's dispositional willingness to try new information technology

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Four Likert items on willingness to experiment with new IT; used as a moderator of acceptance relationships

The predisposition to buy new and different products and brands earlier than most other consumers, the marketing tradition's version of the same innate trait. Midgley and Dowling in 1978 defined innovativeness as innate innovativeness, a general personality characteristic held in some degree by everyone, and separated it sharply from actualised adoption behaviour, which their model treats as the trait filtered through communication and situation. Goldsmith and Hofacker in 1991 argued that the innate trait sits too far above behaviour to predict adoption in any one category, and built a domain-specific innovativeness scale that ties the disposition to a single product class. The standing dispute here, a global personality trait against a domain-specific one, is the same level problem that runs through the information-technology literature.[2][3]

Unit

A consumer's predisposition to adopt new products earlier than others

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Innate-innovativeness personality items, or domain-specific innovativeness items tied to a product class

Innovativeness in Everett Rogers's diffusion theory, defined as the degree to which an individual is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than the other members of their system. This is a relative, behavioural definition rather than a disposition: Rogers ranks members by when they actually adopt and cuts the distribution into five adopter categories, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, bounded by standard deviations from the mean time of adoption. Innovativeness here is a position in a ranked population, recovered after the fact from adoption timing, so two people with the same underlying willingness to try new things can land in different categories depending on who else is in the system with them.[4]

Unit

An adopter's earliness in adopting relative to others in the system

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Relative time of adoption, cut into five adopter categories by standard deviations from the mean