Examining the Relationship between Technology Adoption Barriers, Enablers, and Innovation

: A Study on the Adoption Process of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies

Abstract

This research explores the adoption process of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMTs) and their relationship to innovation. Whilst the literature acknowledged that to successfully adopt AMTs firms face several challenges, relatively few studies have examined the characteristics of the adoption process based on the relative importance of barriers and enablers and the related innovation outcomes of an AMT project.
Against this backdrop, this research is designed upon different calls for future research addressing a set of research objectives. Firstly, the need to further understand the structure of the AMT adoption process and the dynamic nature of barriers and enablers as moderators of innovation. Secondly, it extends the literature on the collaborative relationships involved in technology adoption projects, focusing on the growing importance of the relationships between adopters and technology provider ecosystems. It also responds to studies that have examined organisational capabilities required for AMT adoption providing further evidence on how adopter firms change or adapt AMTs to meet evolving innovation needs.
This research is based on four papers: the first work is a systematic review of eighty-seven peer-reviewed articles from the AMT literature from 1999-2019. This review identified five types of barriers and four types of enablers proposing a conceptual framework illustrating the key stages of the AMT adoption process. Specifically, it reveals how the nature of barriers and enablers act along each stage and the differences between these based on the enabled innovation outcomes.
The subsequent empirical analysis (Chapter Three) tested the framework of the systematic review identifying three additional sub-stages of the adoption process and additional barriers and enablers. The study also describes the importance of technology provider ecosystems shedding light on the dyadic relationship between AMT adopters and providers. Consequently, Chapter Four examined the structure and capabilities of technology provider ecosystems. The analysis reveals the roles of firms part of such ecosystems and the category of capabilities required for the ecosystem to successfully manage the AMT project. More specifically, it shows how these capabilities address the complexity of adopter requirements and facilitate the innovation output of AMT projects for the adopter firm.
Finally, Chapter Five provided a more fine-grained analysis of the relationship between technology adoption and innovation through the theoretical lens of ‘reinvention’, namely the changes made to the AMT system to meet evolving innovation needs. The findings highlight that reinvention depends fundamentally on the relationship between adopters and external ecosystems. Within this knowledge exchange process, both the technological structure (e.g. potential of the AMT system to be customised) as well as the internal managerial initiatives, facilitate reinvention opportunities. This is further illustrated by a matrix capturing different types of reinvention and related opportunities.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Sercan Ozcan (Supervisor) & Chris Simms (Supervisor)