Development of self-reporting assessment tool to assess personal innovativeness

Abstract

In the context of innovation diffusion and marketing, personal innovativeness (PI) is considered crucial as it acts as a precondition for the individual's innovation adoption decision. In exploring recent research papers written by practitioners on the concept of PI, it was identified that most of these papers ended up measuring the level of PI either quantitatively or qualitatively. There, the author realizes that there is a lack of knowledge available to identify PI as a categorical variable (discrete) in qualitative studies. Therefore, to some extent, it occludes qualitative researchers from observing the attributes that different PI typologies are associated with. To fill this gap, the author develops the proposed self-reporting assessment tool (SAT) to assess PI by considering various other mechanisms used by previous academics to measure PI. This article is a concept paper that summarizes the state of knowledge in the field with preliminary work to develop SAT, and it lays the foundation for further research on PI. There, SAT will be useful for qualitative or quantitative researchers to understand the respondent's PI typology at the stage of gathering background information about the respondent.