Resistance to Innovation

Every year in the United States, about 25,000 new products are introduced to the market. Most of these products fail - at considerable expense to the companies that produce them. Looking into such failures, marketers have tended to focus on why certain consumers show little resistence. However, these early adopters comprise only 20 percent of the consumer population. Shaul Oreg and Jacob Goldenberg bring the insights of marketing and organizational behavior to bear on the attitudes and behaviors of the remaining 80 percent who resist innovation. The authors identify two competing definitions of resistence: in marketing, resistence denotes a reluctance to adopt a worthy new product, or one that offers a clear benefit and carries little or no risk. In the field of organizational behavior, employees are defined as resistant if they are unwilling to implement changes regardless of the reasons behind their reluctance. Using real-life examples and clarifying the act of rejecting a new product from the reasons - rational or not - consumers may have for doing so, Oreg and Goldenberg propose a more coherent definition of resistance less encumbered by subjective, context-specific factors and personality traits. Thus, Resistance to Innovation makes it possible to disentangle resistance from its sources and ultimately offers a richer understanding of consumers' underlying motivations.