Organisational Innovativeness and Diffusion of Innovation

In the existing literature, studies of innovativeness usually focus on individual characteristics with little concern for aggregated behaviour; the central role of innovativeness, opinion leadership, and geographic location have not been fully reflected in diffusion models; most diffusion models either make simplified as-sumptions to model aggregated trends or concern individual behaviours exces-sively as being ‘toy models’; understandings of the diffusion forces bifurcate into explanations on social contagion effect and self-conformity effect and few diffu-sion models have tried to combine these two streams of thinking. In order to contribute knowledge to these fields, this study seeks to model the diffusion process from an agent-based perspective, with a specific focus on the effects of organisational innovativeness, opinion leadership, and geographic location. The proposed model is a focusing tool that helps interpret and organise the empirical observation. In turn, the model’s results could raise further questions for empiri-cal exploration.
The result from the model simulation echoes a number of existing works on in-novation strategies with further quantitative implications for both industry policy makers and managers in organisations. It is found that the statistical distributions of organisational innovativeness and opinion leadership are both important fac-tors in diffusion; the level of information flow between organisations with differ-ent innovativeness levels influences the diffusion process significantly; to cluster organisations in one area changes the interactions between them and increases the diffusion rate, even when the average interaction level of the system is con-trolled. The model also indicates that organisations’ self-effort is the only way for being innovators; that factors that are related to interactions with others are more important for laying in the majority category; and that laggards normally adopt innovations by ‘luck’.