The study of innovativeness can be classified into three categories: Firm innovativeness, which refers to the how fast the firm’s ability to create or launch new products; Product innovativeness is the original degree of products; Consumer innovativeness, which is the tendency to buy new products more often and more quickly than other people (Hurley and Hult, 1998; Daneels and Kleinsmith, 2001;
Midgley and Dowling, 1978; Roehrich, 2004). The innovativeness we mention here is referring to consumer innovativeness.
The achievement of technology stimulates the speed of innovation of new products, and led to enormous competition among firms. Managers came up against this market situation and which encourage them to wonder about what consumer want, and how consumer treat the new products. Because firms have to benefit from revenue and that depends on satisfying customer needs better than competitors can satisfy those needs (Hauser, Tellis, and Griffin, 2006).
Besides, it’s not only practitioners have interests in consumer innovativeness, but also academics want to examine the propensities of consumers for novel products, which can play an important role in brand loyalty, decision making, preference, and communication (Hirschman, 1980).
2.4.1 Innovativeness definition
According to Rogers’ study (1962), the attitude of different people to adopt new product have significant variation, some tends to adopt rapidly, and others don’t.
Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) defined innovativeness as the “degree to which an individual is relatively earlier in adopting an innovation than other members of his system”.
In fact, the term “innovativeness” has no real consensus among researchers (Roehrich, 2004). Though Rogers’ time-of-adoption method was accepted by a lot of following researchers at that time, Midgley and Dowling (1978) argued that Rogers’
definition of innovativeness was just an operational definition. They viewed innovativeness as a personality construct possessed to a greater or lesser degree by all individuals (Hirschman, 1980). Innovativeness can be classified into two categories:
innate or inherent innovativeness, and actualized innovativeness (Midgley and Dowling, 1978), the latter is the same with concept of Rogers’ innovativeness. But the relationship between innate innovativeness and actualized consumer behavior is complex and affected by other intervene factors like communication network, interest, situational factors, marketing and so forth (Steenkamp, Hofstede, and Wedel, 1999;
Midgley and Dowling, 1978).
The simplistic trait-behavior model and low-level definition of innovativeness were also discredited in other behavioral sciences (Mischel 1968; Peterson 1968;
Midgley and Dowling, 1978). In addition, Steenkamp et al. (1999) defined that consumer innovativeness as “the predisposition to buy new and different products and brands rather than remain with previous choices and consumption patterns.”
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Therefore, innate innovativeness was deemed a conceptual construct and can’t directly link to actualized consumer behavior due to the system of intervening variables. However, researchers can keep investigate this issue by modifying context setting or role of objective. As a result, we conclude that personality trait which called innovativeness everyone possessed more or less, but have to assess the fitness of application when researchers define the problems. In our discussion, we want do know if this new criterion of segmentation can discriminate various degrees of consumer innovativeness, so the digital camera (DC) purchasers were selected due to the product’s complete development and broad use nowadays.
In addition to the studies of innovation diffusion model and consumer behavior, innovativeness also had been associated with other disciplines, such as psychology, organizational behavior. There were numerous studies investigated the association between innovativeness and personality traits, some have found that innovativeness was correlated positively to optimum stimulation level (Steenkamp and Baumgartner, 1992; Zuckerman, 1979), others maybe creativity, risk taking and so on. Indeed, personal value plays an important role in cognitive structure which might interact with psychological or physical factors, and the objective of this study is not to depict possibly implicit interaction. Nevertheless, private physical attribute plus lifestyle may provide more powerful information for segmentation than before.
2.4.2 Measurement
It is the same to the extent of difficulty confronted by measurement of innovativeness with psychological scales. Since the development of innovativeness scales from the mid-1970s, there existed no homogeneity among theses scales as a result of diversified underlying premise and structure. Midgley and Dowling (1978)
commented that Rogers’ time-of-adoption method was a tautology, and another methodology to measure innovativeness was cross-sectional method, which might better than Rogers’ (Goldsmith and Hofacker, 1991).
Besides, Roehrich (2004) reviewed relative literatures and classified these scales into two categories: life innovativeness scales, which focus on the propensity to innovate at a general behavioral level, included Leavitt and Walton’s (1975), Kirton’s (1976) and Hurt et al.’s (1977). Adoptive innovativeness scales, which focus specifically on the adoption of new products, these scales included Raju’s (1980), Goldsmith and Hofacker (1991), and Baumgartner and Steenkamp (1996).
Because of the discrepancy of underlying framework, several kinds of scales have been used to measure innovativeness separately. For example, Hirschman (1980) thought that innovativeness is related to novelty seeking and consumer creativity, Fromkin (1971) suggested a link between innovative behavior and need for uniqueness, and others can be found in Roehrich’s study (2004).
Similar to Hirschman’s work, Kirton (1976) developed the well-known innovators-adaptators inventory (KAI) scale, but mostly used in the investigation of creative propensity within organization. Raju’s (1980) scale has good internal consistency, but be criticized by its structure. Le Louarn’s (1997) scale has proved to have good psychometric properties and good predictive validity (Roehrich, 2004). It seems like the Le Louarn’s scale is the better one used to measure innovativeness;
however, we abandoned Le Louarn’s scale because of the difficulty of language translation.
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Finally, we choose Goldsmith and Hofacker’s (1991) scale to be our measurement of innovativeness result from its two merits: First, Goldsmith and Hofacker’s Domain-Specific innovativeness scale (DSI) merely consists of six items and directly taps the latent construct itself rather than secondary variable; Second, DSI has been confirmed its validity of both several product field and nations (Flynn and Goldsmith, 1993a; 1993b; Goldsmith and Flynn, 1992; Goldsmith, d’Hauteville and Flynn, 1998).