| dc.description.abstract | In academia, literature on innovation have over the last few decades predominantly focused
on what strategies can help drive acceptance of new innovative products and services.
However, the arguably quite high failure rate for market introductions of innovative products
indicates that academia and innovative companies should increase the focus on understanding
the challenges and pitfalls that could potentially affect the market introduction’s degree of
success.
Far from all innovations are successfully adopted by consumers, and there may be several
situational or contextual user and market related reasons for this. Since the millennia, an
increasing amount of research and literature have focus on innovation resistance with the
ambition of unearthing the factors that influence the intended users. This field of innovation
resistance is as such fairly new, resulting in a lack of generally applicable theories and
definitions which may be a consequence of the factors of resistance being situational and
contextual and therefore varying between industries and markets. This research focus on
understanding what drives innovation resistance within the medical radiographic industry.
For means of understanding the intrinsic drivers and barriers of resistance specific to the
industry, the research has focused on the case of microfocus technology and medical X-ray.
An innovation introduces change to an industry, and when it does, it will arguably face some
resistance among the target customers. Through this case study, the main triggering drivers of
innovation resistance within the medical radiographic industry are identified (unawareness or
indifference to innovation, and preferences for the status quo), what main barriers against
innovation adoption are created (visibility, communicability, norms & traditions, usage,
information, and risk), and through what modes of resistance the device-manufacturers resist
the innovation (postponement of adoption, and rejection of the innovation). It is shown that
the device-manufacturers resist the innovation to varying degrees, from caution to outright
rejection. The innovation resistance is based upon the current lack of information regarding
the technology, and inefficient dissemination of the benefits and functionality to alleviate the
perceived risks and uncertainties revolving the innovation. | sv |
