Intra-firm Adoption Decisions:: Role of Inter-firm and Intra-firm Variables

The subject of this paper is intra-firm adoption decisions, a relatively unexplored research area in the marketing literature. We develop a conceptual model in which two sets of independent variables are hypothesized to influence the intra-firm adoption decisions, i.e. (1) variables known from the inter-firm diffusion literature, (2) variables specifically relevant for intra-firm analyses of innovation acceptance. Hypotheses are developed and tested in an application in the domain of finance: the intra-firm adoption decisions regarding the common European currency by the treasury, purchasing and sales departments of European companies. Data were obtained from treasury, purchasing and sales managers (441 respondents in total) from companies located in five different European countries. The results of logistic regression show that the proposed intra-firm variables are indeed important explanatory variables that should be included in intra-firm analyses. Moreover, for the inter-firm variables we found differences in the effects between departments, which demonstrates the very need for an intra-firm analysis.