Consumer resistance to innovation among public universities' students in Pakistan

Implementations of technological innovations have been playing key roles for firms to grow and survive in the long run particularly in a dynamic and complex market and unstable economic conditions. The success of any innovation in the market which highly depends on consumers could be one of the potential factors behind the failure of the innovation. Research on innovation resistance is still in infancy and effort to describe the resistance as well as understanding the consumers’ resistance to innovation still require in-depth investigations including the context of resistance to innovation. As a response to this problem, this study examines the consumers’ resistance to innovation through measuring the resistance to smartphones. This study is grounded by the resistance to innovation and appraisal theories. In the research framework, this study includes consumers’ characteristics (motivation, self-efficacy, emotion (negative), and attitude towards existing product) and innovation characteristics (relative advantage, perceived risk, complexity, social influence, and price). A cross sectional, survey data was gathered from 307 university students of four public universities in Pakistan via self-administered survey questionnaires. They were statistically tested using PLS (SEM) path modeling. The results demonstrate the concept of consumers’ resistance to innovation in the context of Pakistan. The results also reveal that majority of the main consumers’ and innovation characteristics (complexity, emotion (negative), motivation, price, self-efficacy, social influence, and consumers’ innovativeness (moderator) have significant influence on consumers’ resistance to smartphone. However, three consumers’ and innovation characteristics (relative advantage, perceived risk, and attitude towards existing product) are insignificant with consumers’ resistance to innovation. The significant factors are good predictors of consumers’ resistance to innovation. Based on the findings of the study, the theoretical and practical contributions are described. The limitations of the study are discussed and suggestions for future studies are also deliberately addressed.