Organizational Assimilation of Innovations: A Multilevel Contextual Analysis

Abstract

This study examined the assimilation of innovations into organizations, a process unfolding in a series of decisions to evaluate, adopt, and implement new technologies. Assimilation was conceptualized as a nine-step process and measured by tracking 300 potential adoptions through organizations during a six-year period. We advance a model suggesting that organizational assimilation of technological innovations is determined by three classes of antecedents: contextual attributes, innovation attributes, and attributes arising from the interaction of contexts and innovations Why and how do organizations evaluate, adopt, and implement innovations? Few research questions have spanned so many social science disciplines, elicited such an outpouring of empirical research, and yielded so few unequivocal findings. The literature on innovation has been described as “fragmentary” (: 164), “contradictory” (: 698), and “beyond interpretation” (: 700). No real theory has emerged that permits researchers to predict the extent to which a given organization will employ a given innovation (). The literature offers little guidance to those seeking to influence the rate or direction of technological change (). From both theoretical and practical perspectives, our cumulative knowledge of why and how organizations adopt and implement innovations is considerably less than the sum of its parts. This article draws on extensive observations of organizations assimilating technological innovations conducted as part of a six-year field study (). Assimilation is defined here as an organizational process that (1) is set in motion when individual organization members first hear of an innovation's development, (2) can lead to the acquisition of the innovation, and (3) sometimes comes to fruition in the innovation's full acceptance, utilization, and institutionalization. Our ...