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INTRODUCTION
The most successful innovations combine feasible technological bases, entrepreneurial skills, and knowledge of the needs and wants of the customers--the innovation triumvirate. Of these three criteria, by far the most important is the customer needs. A product or service must be relevant, have demonstrated value and meet specific needs in order to prosper. Triggering this innovative process is a market opportunity and an entrepreneur who sees both the market opening and a new product or service that can satisfy it. New technology is often necessary but in itself is not sufficient; the consumer's need is the key to success.
All too often, however, the marketing mechanism employed is not marketing pull but technological push: first, a new scientific principle is discovered and a novel technology developed. Then a product is designed for a market need not yet known or apparent. However, building a better mousetrap will not cause the world to beat a path to your door if there are no mice in the area; the existing mousetrap is satisfactory and much cheaper, or your sensational trap requires bait which is unavailable. Like proponents of the better mousetrap, marketers often presume that since the technology exists and an innovation has been created, its diffusion is inevitable, a fait accompli. They all too often to their chagrin disregard any questions about an innovation's acceptance by its potential users prior to its introduction. Many products fail to win over sufficient users to become a commercial success; the failure is all too often the firm or industry's lack of sensitivity to the customer acceptance of the new technology being pushed (see Figures 1 and 2). (Figures 1 and 2 omitted)
The subject of customer acceptance of technological innovations has not been adequately surveyed. The major thrust of this article is the examination of the customer acceptance of a technology and the resulting probability that a diffusion of that innovation might occur.
THE ASSUMPTION OF CUSTOMER ACCEPTANCE
Customer adoption has been shown to occur through a consistent and fairly predictable adoption process--the classic "S" curve. This curve (one version of which is called the Gompertz curve) is intuitively appealing: the initial slowness is due to the inertia caused by the usually immense investments made in the existing technologies...