Active innovation resistance: An empirical study on functional and psychological barriers to innovation adoption in different contexts

Active innovation resistance is considered to be a main driver of innovation rejection, and traditionally related to five product-specific adoption barriers driving this negative attitude formation. While recent literature introduced a more comprehensive typology encompassing nine functional and eight psychological barriers driving active innovation resistance, an empirical validation of this framework is still missing. In order to close this research gap, we employed a two-study design. First, we conducted a qualitative study to empirically evaluate whether the typology including 17 adoption barriers encompasses all possible negative, product driven reactions of consumers within new product evaluations. Second, we used a quantitative large-scale study to assess the relative importance of each single product-specific adoption barrier within new product evaluations in the context of product and mobile service innovation. Both studies confirm that innovations are commonly rejected owing to these 17 product-specific adoption barriers. However, our results also highlight that functional and psychological barriers vary in their effect on adoption intention depending on whether a new product or service gets evaluated. This study provides first empirical evidence in favor of applying a more comprehensive typology of product-specific barriers when assessing effects of active innovation resistance on consumers' adoption behavior in future research.