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Shifting perspectives: How communicating user innovations’ self-focus enhances adoption

Author

Listed:
  • Helen Si Wang

    (University of Colorado - Denver)

  • Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim

    (The University of Hong Kong)

Abstract

Each year, millions of user inventors spend billions of dollars creating innovations for their own use and to satisfy their own needs. Many user entrepreneurs also commercialize their user innovations to the mass market to benefit others and generate financial return. However, because user innovations are inherently self-focused, they often fail to achieve adoption in the mass market, leading to significant social welfare losses. Extant research suggests deploying customer-focused design modifications to improve the diffusion of user innovations. As an alternative to this customer-focused perspective, the authors propose a novel communication strategy that evokes adopters’ creativity to increase adoption. In particular, presenting user innovations’ self-focused goals and related key attributes in a sequence that mismatches adopters’ default innovation learning sequences can evoke adopters’ creative thinking regarding the self-relevance of the user innovations, and in turn enhances adoption. Furthermore, deploying self-focused, user inventor solo (vs. customer-focused, open customer participation) enhancement strategy sustains (vs. attenuates) the proposed effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Helen Si Wang & Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim, 2025. "Shifting perspectives: How communicating user innovations’ self-focus enhances adoption," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 53(3), pages 931-948, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:joamsc:v:53:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s11747-024-01068-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s11747-024-01068-z
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