Penetration of innovation: taming the unexplored interactions between information, knowledge and persuasion in the innovation-decision model

Abstract

Building upon Everett Roger's theory of Diffusion of Innovations, foraging into knowledge acquisition theories, and leaning heavily onto the new communication perspectives opened by New Media, the present study aims to justify the need to revisit the classical innovation-decision process and concomitantly it proposes an innovative model of information influence on innovation acceptance. The research inquiry, conducted using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, confirmed the existence of a cumulative innovation-decision process, fueled by a cyclical interplay of information gathering, knowledge acquisition and persuasive evaluation. Concurrently, the results sustained the theoretical model's assumption regarding the existence of a barrier to adoption and successfully tested the effect of dedicated information on the knowledge-generating and persuasive processes.