The e-book reader, Kindle, which Amazon.com officially promoted in November, 2007, has caught the eye of global market, and the sale volumes reached 500,000 in 2008(Bureau of Industrial Development, MOEA, 2009). Moreover, the Kindle2 promoted in March, 2009, has also created a good performance. The success in Kindle lets many Taiwanese manufacturers think the feasibility of developing the e-book reader market in Taiwan. Therefore, this research uses Innovation-Decision Process (Rogers, 2003) and New Product Adoption Model (Holak, 1988) to study the effects of perceived attributes of innovation, include relative advantage, compatibility and complexity, on purchase intention Taiwanese having. Furthermore, the influences about substitutes and reading habits on the purchase intention were also discussed in this study. According to the possible consumer groups, this research focus on Taiwanese who live in Taiwan now and who must be office workers had college degree or be university, graduate, or PhD students. The period of survey was from March 19 to April 18 in 2010 and the questionnaires were handed out through personal interview and e-mail. The number of questionnaires collected is 202 and only 158 questionnaires had confirmed to the standard the study requested. In 158 questionnaires, 42% are office workers and 58% are students; 59% are male and 41% are female; the age distribution of 158 questionnaires is from 20 to 59 years old, and 58% are in the range 20 to 29 years old; About the disposable monthly income, 40% are in the rang NT$5,000 to NT$9,999; 85% are live in south of Taiwan. The findings showed: (1) At present, Only 28% respondents have the purchase intention of e-book reader (selling price for NT$10,000 about); (2) The first three factors which attract Taiwanese to purchase an e-book reader include easy to carry (70%), saving the space to store paper books (40%), and easy to read when you are moving (37%); (3) The relative advantage affected the purchase intention positively; (4) The degree respondents approved of reading paper books usually was positively correlated with purchase intention; (5) The purchase intention was higher when respondents had netbooks or smartphones, and more items of substitutes they had.

The view of procurement and partnership management with the supplier has been drastically changed for many enterprises, because of the emergence of Internet and Electrical Commerce in the present age. The way of competition between enterprises has been combined into the supply chain. We believe that the implementation of e-procurement will contribute to the increasing of gross profit, benefit and competitiveness undoubtedly. For the big firm like integrated steel mill, it is definitely necessary to simplify the complicated purchasing procedure, so that the tactical issue of e-procurement just can create high value from the procurement. In this thesis, an Innovation Adoption model is proposed to study the e-procurement adoption intention by MRO supplier of Taiwan¡¦s steel industry, and it¡¦s impact on supply chain also has been evaluated. Based on relevant research, the Innovation Diffusion adoption model in the thesis is proposed, which is composed of three major perspectives including environment, organization, and e-procurement technology factor. Besides, related issues in each perspectives are also addressed. Furthermore, two perspectives of partnership and achievement of supplier are also proposed to study the impact of the performance of supply chain. The conclusion of this research indicates that supplier will increase the intension of adopting e-procurement depends on buyer¡¦s resource support as well as buyer¡¦s coercive power. In addition, top management support of supplier is a important factor for the adoption. Besides, market share and transaction frequency in the e-procurement represent buyer being a significant customer will enforce the will of supplier to corporate with buyer to adopt e-procurement. Furthermore, result from regression analysis shows that Trust is major influential factor for the performance of supply chain. However, influence of Trust will be reduced, because of perceived cost being emphasized. The transaction mechanism of e-procurement should provide a fair and transparency transaction platform, so that supplier will corporate to enforce the performance of entire supply chain. According to the research result, some of the advisements for the supplier and buyer were also discussed in thesis

In this Thesis I will examine technology adoption by analyzing how different organizations come to interpret a technology as a specific kind of innovation based on a certain set of criteria. The kind of innovation an organization interprets a technology to be effects how quickly the organization will adopt that technology. To analyze how organizations come to interpret technologies as a specific kind of innovation I will construct a model. I will utilize the Actor-Network Theory from Science and Technology Studies as the framework to combined theories regarding technology adoption from other disciplines. This new model of technology adoption will be able to address the individual weakness of each theory that I use, and at the same time build on the strengths of the Actor-Network Theory. I will conclude my thesis by testing my new model using an event study from econometrics. Using the surrogate measure of the stock market to represent consumers, the event study will allow me to gauge if the kind of innovation a technology is interpreted as affects the rate of its adoption. / Master of Science

Based on grounded theory and thematic analysis of 70 in-depth interviews conducted over 32 months (from November 2007 to June 2010) with domain scientists, computational technologists, supercomputer center administrators, program officers at the National Science Foundation, social scientists, policy analysts, and industry experts, this dissertation explores the rationalities behind initial adoption of cyberinfrastructure for e-science in the early 21st century U.S. This dissertation begins with Research Question 1 (i.e., how does cyberinfrastructure's nature influence its adoption process in early 21st century U.S.?) and identifying four areas of challenging conditions to reveal a lack of trialability/observability (due to the participatory/bespoke nature), a lack of simplicity (due to the meta/complex characteristic), a lack of perceived compatibility (due to the disruptive/revolutionary quality), and a lack of full control (due to the community/network property). Then analysis for Research Question 2 (i.e., what are the rationalities that drive cyberinfrastructure adoption in early 21st century U.S.?) suggests that there are three primary driving rationalities behind adoption. First, the adoption of cyberinfrastructure as a meta-platform of interrelated technologies is driven by the perceived need for computational power, massive storage, multi-scale integration, and distributed collaboration. Second, the adoption of cyberinfrastructure as an organizational/behavioral practice is driven by its relative advantages to produce quantitative and/or qualitative benefits that increase the possibility of major publications and scientific reputations. Third, the adoption of cyberinfrastructure as a new approach to science is driven and maintained by shared visions held by scientists, technologists, professional networks, and scientific communities. Findings suggests that initial adoption by pioneering users was driven by the logic of quantitative and qualitative benefits derived from optimizing cyberinfrastructure resources to enable breakthrough science and the vision of what is possible for the entire scientific community. The logic was sufficient to drive initial adoption despite the challenging conditions that reveal the socio-technical barriers and risky time-investment. Findings also suggest that rationalization is a structuration process, which is sustained by micro individual actions and governed by macro community norms simultaneously. Based on Browning’s (1992) framework of organizational communication, I argue that cyberinfrastructure adoption in the early 21st century lies at the intersection of technical rationalities (i.e., perceived needs, relative advantages, and shared visions) and narrative rationalities (i.e., trialability, observability/communicability, simplicity, perceived compatibility, and full control). / text

Background: The term Open Innovation describes a phenomenon where organizations are no longer solely relying on internal R&D to innovate technologies that they then would bring to market. Instead, firms are looking outside for ideas or working with other organizations to develop technologies in order to capitalize on efficiencies of existing knowledge, reduce investment risks and increase speed to market. We identified a need to analyze the existing open innovation adoption frameworks in order to track similarities and differences so that we could create a new framework which is more comprehensive. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to create a framework for the analysis of the open innovation adoption process which is based on organizational change and other relevant streams of research. In order to do this we were to find answers to the following research questions: 1) How can organizational change theory be used to analyze the movement from a closed to open innovation strategy? 2) In addition to organizational change theory, which research streams should be considered when analyzing the open innovation adoption process? 3) To what extent does our new framework provide an adequate foundation for analyzing the open innovation adoption process at SCA Hygiene Products? Results: Our new framework is meant for the analysis of open innovation adoption process. The framework helps researchers to analyze how different organizations have adopted open innovation based on the four research streams that we have analyzed. Our framework includes aspects of organizational change theory, knowledge management, networks and managerial roles. Key Words: open innovation adoption, organizational change, knowledge management, networks, SCA

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Lead users are proposed as a valuable resource for marketers in terms of the (1) development, (2) adoption, and (3) diffusion of new products. We present the first consumer study to provide evidence that the latter two suggestions are justified. First, we find that lead users demonstrate stronger domain-specific innovativeness than more "ordinary" users. Second, lead users perceive new technologies as less "complex" and might therefore be better prepared to adopt them. Third, we find that lead users demonstrate stronger opinion leadership and weaker opinion seeking tendencies. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the marketing of new products. (authors' abstract)

Despite various efforts to introduce support measures and financial incentives to improve innovation in the public sector, it is widely perceived that the adoption of innovation is a slow and complex process (Albury, 2005; Coriat and Levinthal, 1990). Evidence of previous research indicates that the adoption of innovation varies considerably across public sector organisations, regardless of the perceived potential benefit of the new product (or service) (Cash and MOster, 2000; Edquist, 2005).The public procurement and innovation literature emphasises the potential of public sector organisations as important buyers and adopters of innovation, highlighting the role of public demand for the triggering and diffusion of innovation (Edler et al. 2011; Cunningham and Karakasidou, 2009; Edquist, 1997). However, innovation adoption in the public sector has been characterised as a slow and unpredictable process where the underlying institutional factors that play a role in the adoption process are not fully understood (Albury, 2005; Allman et al., 2011). The topic of poor adoption in the public sector is of great significance, not only for the innovation agenda, but also due to the increasing pressure on the public sector to achieve higher quality services with more efficient allocation of resources, particularly the NHS (Bonoma, 1985).The main objective of the research is to address the problem of slow and inconsistent adoption of innovation in the public sector, by providing a more holistic and institutional perspective to the study of innovation adoption, addressing the lack of context specific research on the topic. A major focus of this work is to understand the relationship between the adoption of innovation and institutions as a means to establish a more in-depth understanding of the institutional features that influence the adoption process. The research focuses on new technology procurement cases in the context of the English and Scottish NHS system, as two different institutional contexts, in order to identify the institutional features at the system’s and organisational level hat make a difference in adoption of innovation.

Smart home technology was first conceptualized in 1989 and has extensively been promoted for many years ever since. However, even after 30 years since conceptualization, the technology has seen very low penetration levels and consistently missed all market forecasts. The objective of this thesis is to identify different reasons as to why smart home technology has not been adopted yet using innovation resistance theory. We use the innovation resistance framework by Ram and Sheth (1989) and exploratory research to identify all possible reasons for consumer resistance. We then conduct a quantitative study, by sending out online surveys to consumers, to identify which of these factors cause the highest resistance. Multivariate linear regression and other statistical methods were used to analyze the quantitative data. Physical risk, the real-world risks of adopting this technology (including privacy and cybersecurity risks), was the most important barrier to adoption. This was closely followed by economic risk, the risk associated with buying a device, installing it, and paying a monthly subscription fee for it to work. To increase adoption, smart home manufacturers should try to reduce these risks to kick start mass adoption. Because economic barrier includes multiple latent variables (representing different phases of the product), further research is needed to identify which of these different latent variables lead to higher economic resistance. We hope that this study can be used as a guide to help smart home manufacturing companies identify consumers’ most important pain points.

Demand for new methods of beef production is rising due to concern over potential impacts on human health, animal welfare, and the environment. Researchers at Utah State University have developed a method of beef production from cattle finished on tannin-containing legume forages in the Rocky Mountain Region in order to address those concerns. To ensure success of this product, the demand and marketability needed to be assessed. Food values addressed through new production standards and certifications are communicated through labeling by culinary professionals in the kitchen and behind service counters. This research study utilized qualitative methods to understand how culinary leaders construct meaning regarding non-conventional beef. A discursive analysis of labels, menus, and websites revealed that storytelling and branding are more important than third-party certifications. Thematic analysis of interviews with culinary professionals discovered participants are open to new products but environmental concern was tempered by concern for pleasing customers and hindered by planning a menu around consistency and quality. This research found that the success of beef from cattle finished on tannin-containing legume forages is dependent on the benefits being communicated in a way that emphasizes authenticity, tradition, and standards of quality necessary for culinary professionals.