According to previous studies, innovation effects such as usefulness and ease of use influence Information and Communication Technology (ICT) emphasizing utilitarian-oriented values. Most of those studies, however, have overlooked imitation effects such as subjective norms, word of mouth and advertising associated with cultural values, social networks and hedonic-oriented values.
In addition, it was difficult for most studies about user acceptance to set external validity due to subject issues and continuous behavior of adopters over time was hard to describe since most studies were not longitudinal, but cross-sectional. In order to overcome those limitations, in this study, mathematical diffusion model with verified official time-series data is used for analytically investigating the impact of both innovation and imitation effects on mobile phone’s adoption in South Korea.
The results showed that : (1) the imitation effect of first mover is larger than those of followers in matured South Korea’s mobile market. (2) the innovation effects of followers are larger than that of first mover in matured South Korea’s mobile market. (3) the innovation effect is larger than imitation effect in matured South Korea’s mobile market. Especially result (3) was quite different from what we expected and it was very interesting finding.
The research clearly revealed the adoption dependent factors like innovation effect and imitation effect. This study also assessed the adoption pattern which may be able to lead to further research on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption.
