Who put the “NO” in Innovation? Innovation resistance leaders’ behaviors and self-identities

Individuals can exert strong influence on the fate of innovations. However, we know little about the most conspicuous market actors who resist innovations: innovation resistance leaders. We define innovation resistance leaders as figureheads in media and as active opponents who act against an innovation to exert influence at the societal level. To understand their role, we seek to answer the following questions: How do innovation resistance leaders engage in resistance, and who are these leaders? Our exploratory qualitative analysis of eight resistance cases reveals the following two behaviorally distinct resistance leader types. Initiators are among the first people to notice a problem after an innovation launch, and they scale up a resistance movement through the media (i.e., they organize a resistance initiation process), whereas Aggregators join an existing movement after a critical mass of negative voices has been reached (i.e., they organize a resistance aggregation process). Regarding resistance leaders’ self-identities, Initiators tend to have a missionary social identity while Aggregators tend to have a consumerist one. We contribute to innovation resistance and adoption as well as innovation diffusion literature by conceptualizing a new type of resister who, based on their self-identity, performs two distinct and newly identified resistance diffusion processes

Affordable or Premium Innovation The Influence of Individual and Contextual Factors on Innovators' Engagement in Different Innovation Types

Affordable innovations target customers with a low willingness or ability to pay. While researchers and practitioners increasingly recognise the importance of affordable innovation to society, we know little about the conditions under which individual innovators engage in affordable innovation rather than its counterpart: premium innovation. In our qualitative study of 55 innovators, we first uncover the individual and contextual factors that determine innovators' commitment to affordable and premium innovations. We also identify common combinations of factors that lead to different types of affordable and premium innovators. Finally, we highlight the conditions under which innovators move from affordable to premium innovations and from premium to affordable innovations. These results contribute to the innovation literature by showing that a conceptual distinction between affordable and premium innovations is necessary to understand individual innovative commitment and by explaining why innovators often choose premium innovations over socially relevant affordable innovations

The high-end bias - A decision-maker preference for premium over economy innovations

Deciding which new product concepts to develop is an important strategic management decision. One part of it is to decide whether to develop “premium” products, priced above the average product on the market, or “economy” products, priced lower than the average product on the market. We hypothesize that, ceteris paribus, firms and individual decision makers prefer premium over economy innovation projects. Building on implicit attitude and status discrimination theories, we argue that the origin of the bias lies in the implicit decision-making system of the mind, such that decision-makers inherently prefer premium innovations and that this implicit high-end bias affects their explicit preferences. We use the results from one longitudinal set of archival sales data covering 2312 new product introductions and three experimental studies with decision makers, including practicing managers, to provide evidence for the high-end bias. With these findings, we extend status theory as well as discrimination theory from well researched personnel decisions to managerial decisions about inanimate objects such as product concepts. We further augment literature on low-end innovation by identifying an important constraint for managers and researchers who work on inclusive innovation, frugal innovation, social responsibility, and Base of the Pyramid innovation

The overlooked role of embeddedness in disruptive innovation theory

Disruptive innovation theory assumes that primary and secondary performance dimensions as well as price influence adoption and use differently depending on the product category. Study 1 tests this premise using a large and heterogeneous sample of consumers. We surveyed 871 users in three traditional, high-cost product categories (business software, video games, conventional TV) and three related, potentially disruptive, low-costproduct categories (mobile business apps, mobile games, internet TV). The study does not find systematic differences between the effects of more technologically-oriented performance dimensions or price on adoption. Following an explanatory mixed-methods approach, Study 2, which relies on 32 in-depth interviews with consumers, shows that product embeddedness, a more socially-oriented dimension, may play a decisive role in explaining the results. Embeddedness, defined as the degree to which a product is anchored in the social, market and technological system of the user, is an important moderator that complements extant theory and may thus help to better understand the dynamics of disruptive innovations

The dilemma of downstream market stakeholder involvement in NPD: Untangling the effects of involvement and capabilities on performance

In many industries, new product development (NPD) success depends on whether products simultaneously provide value to multiple stakeholders on the demand-side of the firm like buyers, users, payers and regulators. Building on the open innovation and stakeholder literatures, we explore the dilemma of downstream market stakeholder involvement: it can help firms to create value for the market and increase their NPD financial performance but it can also negatively affect NPD efficiency. In addition, we test whether three dimensions of stakeholder involvement capabilities (identification, interaction and integration), allow firms to benefit from stakeholder involvement without impairing efficiency. The results of a survey in the medical device industry show that stakeholder involvement breadth has a positive effect on NPD financial performance and that stakeholder involvement intensity leads to less efficient NPD processes. Finally, we find that interaction and integration capabilities contribute to NPD efficiency, while identification capability is detrimental

Innovation Inhibitors as Catalysts of Societal Progress – The Role of Resistance Leaders in Innovation Diffusion

Conventional wisdom associates innovations and technologies with drivers of societal progress and promotes openness to change. However, many consumers respond with resistance to novelties. Previous literature describes resisters as passive laggards who are reluctant to change. Active opponents whoinitiate countermeasures are rarely the focus of research endeavours. We shed light on resistance leaders’ idiosyncrasies, motives and societal roles with multiple case study research, including eight cases, 21 interviews and more than 400 secondary data sources. Contradictory to conventional wisdom, we find that resistance leaders are not laggards – they have pro-societal motives, are innovative and can take two different roles to promote societal progress. Aggregators gather negative opinions of consumers and reflect the present consumer concerns about an innovation. Initiators are the first who recognize a potential problem and focus on uncertain wider implication of technologies. Our new theory leads to several managerial implications and provides avenues for future research