Consumer Innovativeness: A Literature Review

This paper reports the results of a systematic review of recent literature on consumer innovativeness. The main purpose of the research is to identify the current research themes, understand emerging themes, and predict future directions in consumer innovativeness research. Previous reviews were either narrowly scoped or needed to be updated. Accordingly, the current literature review may fill this gap in the literature. The study sample is 188 articles published in journals indexed in the Web of Science database in the last decade. Content analysis was employed by using quantitative and narrative approaches. Based on the content analysis, these articles were assigned to five research themes as follows: 1) consequences of consumer innovativeness; 2) antecedents of consumer innovativeness; 3) the moderating role of consumer innovativeness; 4) the mediating role of consumer innovativeness; 5) measurement of consumer innovativeness. The findings showed that the highest proportion of articles reviewed in this study involve research that examines the consequences of consumer innovativeness. New product adoption is the most commonly identified consequence of consumer innovativeness. The next most common research themes were the moderator role and antecedents of consumer innovativeness. Articles in the measurement of consumer innovativeness were relatively rare. The fewer number of articles in the research theme indicates that measurement of consumer innovativeness has been well identified in the previous studies. The mediator role of consumer innovativeness was not common in the last decade. The research themes were examined in detail by providing the variables included in the previous studies and the study findings, as well. The research confirms the crucial role of consumer innovativeness in adoption. Besides, the findings indicated the augmented role of consumer innovativeness in consumer behaviour literature. The results of the research can be useful for guiding future research.