Theorizing about the Early-Stage Diffusion of Codependent IT Innovations
Authors: Parameswaran, Srikanth; Kishore, Rajiv; Yang, Xuanhui; Liu, Zhenyu
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2023)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00789
<jats:p>In this paper, we focus on the early-stage diffusion of codependent IT innovations, which are a type of innovation in which the overall innovation consists of two complementary parts that are adopted by two different adopter communities but where both parts need to be jointly adopted by the two coadopter communities for successful diffusion of the overall innovation. Using innovation diffusion, organizing vision (OV), and institutional entrepreneurship theories as the key theoretical lenses, and an in-depth case study reconstructed using 20 years of discourse surrounding Walmart’s campaign in the early stage of diffusion of the RFID-in-retailing technology, we develop a fourphase process model for the early-stage diffusion of codependent IT innovations. We make three specific contributions to the IS discipline, specifically to the literature on IS innovation adoption and diffusion. First, we add the notion of coadopter relative advantage and posit that the organization in the coadopter community with a higher coadopter relative advantage that perceives the highest degree of coadopter relative advantage will emerge as an institutional entrepreneur (IE) and will influence th…