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” (Kelly & Kranzberg, 1978: 164), “contradictory” (Kimberly & Evanisko, 1981: 698), and “beyond interpretation” (Downs & Mohr, 1976: 700). No ...