Consumers’ resistance to digital innovations: A systematic review and framework development

Abstract

Consumer resistance is one of the major causes of failure of any innovation. Despite rising academic interest, the non-adoption of digital innovation or consumer resistance has received less scholarly attention as compared to the factors driving the adoption of digital products and services. The existing research on consumer resistance is also in siloes, running across multiple verticals, spanning from resistance to green products to the Internet of things (IoT). The current study provides a systematic review of the extant literature on consumer resistance to digital innovations by utilising the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology. A total of 54 studies were selected for content analysis to isolate thematic foci, identify research gaps, recommend future research avenues and develop a framework. Our analysis revealed that the extant literature could be grouped under broad research themes, namely resistance to digital innovations, organisational resistance to technological innovations, resistance to technological healthcare innovations and consumer resistance to innovations (offline). The results of this SLR study are expected to galvanise future research in this area from the theoretical as well as from a practice-oriented perspective by providing various actionable inputs to combat consumer resistance to digital innovations.