Innovation adoption and diffusion in business-to-business marketing

Abstract

Purpose

The current knowledge concerning how organizations adopt innovations is considerably less than the sum of its parts. The aim of this paper is to review the innovation adoption and diffusion approach and connect it with the main related theoretical fields within business-to-business marketing.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper provides a conceptual discussion, the aim being to develop an integrative conceptual framework.

Findings

The adoption and diffusion approach gives little indication of the effects on adoption of the established relationships and the wider relational setting comprising the direct and indirect influences between the network actors. It is rather the innovation and the related communication that are in focus. As a result, the innovation and its adoption and diffusion are considered unique phenomena, the actors are assigned the static roles of opinion leaders and change agents, social system can be defined, and there is no competition. The current theoretical approaches within the business-to-business marketing could provide support in building a more realistic view of adoption and diffusion in industrial context.

Originality/value

The contribution of the proposed conceptual model lies in its capacity to take into account organizational behavior in the form of individual-level actions that underpin the adoption process and relate this intra-firm behavior to its wider network context, thereby facilitating the production of a system-level account and a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of adoption.

Citation

Sakari Makkonen, H. and J. Johnston, W. (2014), "Innovation adoption and diffusion in business-to-business marketing", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 29 No. 4, pp. 324-331. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-08-2013-0163