The aim of this study is to investigate if households or organizations are faster in their adoption of an innovation. There does not appear to be existing research on this area of diffusion of innovations research. In this comparative study, the study object is digital terrestrial television (DTT), specifically the implementation of DTT in Denmark. By taking a service theory approach, DTT can be categorized as a service innovation. The rate of adoption is a concept in diffusion of innovations theory, which is used as the study's theoretical framework. For both units of analysis, three surveys were carried out. Based on the data, the rate of adoption for households and for organizations was established. It is clear that organizations adopt an innovation faster than households during the entire adoption process. Based on this research, a predictive model is constructed conceptually.
TopA Service Theory Approach
Research has made it clear that DTT is not, as some might think, about technology, or rather, not just about technology (Vejlgaard, 2018). At first glance, because of the word digital, DTT could be assumed to be about a technological innovation. This will quite naturally lead to the understanding that the adoptive process of DTT is about technology diffusion. However, this may be a premature conclusion. While there is no doubt that, in technical terms, DTT is transmission of television signals as digital units (bits) through the air (Benoit 2008), this cannot lead to the conclusion that DTT in a diffusion context “automatically” is a technological innovation. Vejlgaard (2018) established that DTT is a service innovation, not a technological innovation.
With fluid and blurred boundaries between technology and service offerings, the perception of an innovation may also be open to interpretation legally. In the beginning of the 2010s many digital innovations were introduced, for instance, as apps. The Uber taxi company and the company’s drivers and customers may have viewed Uber as an app-based tech company but the European Court of Justice has determined that it is a transportation company, that is, a service company (BBC News, 2017). Therefore, it is important to analyze an innovation and put it into the correct industry and product category, and not just assume that an innovation is one or the other. This approach has been applied to research on cloud computing, which was viewed as “a technology and service innovation.” (Hwang, Huang & Yang, 2016). Service innovation is a subject in itself, a subject that is closely related to service theory, for instance, services marketing theory.