Post-Adoption Variations in Usage and Value of E-Business by Organizations: Cross-Country Evidence from the Retail Industry

By Kevin Zhu, Kenneth L. Kraemer. Information systems research, 2005

1,860 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Grounded in the innovation diffusion literature and the resource-based theory, this paper develops an integrative research model for assessing the diffusion and consequence of e-business at the firm level. Unlike the typical focus on adoption as found in the literature, we focus on postadoption stages, that is, actual usage and value creation. The model thus moves beyond dichotomous "adoption versus nonadoption" and accounts for the "missing link"--actual usage--as a critical stage of value creation. The model links technological, organizational, and environmental factors to e-business use and value, based on which a series of hypotheses are developed. The theoretical model is tested by using structural equation modeling on a dataset of 624 firms across 10 countries in the retail industry. To probe deeper into whether e-business use and value are influenced by economic environments, two subsamples from developed and developing countries are compared. The study finds that technology competence, firm size, financial commitment, competitive pressure, and regulatory support are important antecedents of e-business use. In addition, the study finds that, while both front-end and back-end capabilities contribute to e-business value, back-end integration has a much stronger impact. While front-end functionalities are becoming commodities, e-businesses are more differentiated by back-end integration. This is consistent with the resource-based theory because back-end integration possesses the value-creating characteristics of resources (e.g., firm specific, difficult to imitate), which are strengthened by the Internet-enabled connectivity. Our study also adds an international dimension to the innovation diffusion literature, showing that careful attention must be paid to the economic and regulatory factors that may affect technology diffusion across different countries.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa14067957eabe58c12cccb9c2c735bc00fde134

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Citations in the corpus

E-commerce adoption by SMEs in developing countries: evidence from Indonesia (2017, background): “The wider the scope of e-commerce use in businesses, the more likely the realization of even greater commerce benefits (Zhu and Kraemer 2005).”
Adoption of E-Commerce Applications in SMEs (2011, background): “…TOE framework was found to provide consistent empirical support in a number of IS domains including electronic funds transfer (EFT), electronic data interchange (EDI), open systems, material requirement planning, and enterprise resource planning (Pan and Jang, 2008; Zhu and Kraemer, 2005).”
Migration to Open-Standard Interorganizational Systems: Network Effects, Switching Costs, and Path Dependency (2005, methodology): “Evidence also suggests that firms in these two industries (e.g., Dell, Wal-Mart, and General Electric) lead in using open-standard networks to streamline transactions along the value chain (Zhu and Kraemer 2005).”
The Effects of Digital Transformation on Firm Performance: Evidence from China’s Manufacturing Sector (2021, background): “Most academic papers focus on the effect of one speciﬁc digital technology on corporate ﬁnancial performance [24–28].”
Determinants of e-business diffusion: A test of the technology diffusion perspective (2008, background): “…Web technologies, most studies focused on Web technologies have differentiated internal integration and external diffusion, concentrating on the permeation of the diffusion process in extended firm value chain (Rogers, 1995; Gonsalves et al., 1999; Ranganathan et al., 2004; Zhu and Kraemer, 2005).”
Why people keep coming back to Facebook: Explaining and predicting continuance participation from an extended theory of planned behaviour perspective (2013, background): “This is because the key activity in post-adoption is value creation through continuance use, rather than simply adoption and penetration [84].”
Literature Review of Information Technology Adoption Models at Firm Level (2011, background): “…Martins 2009); enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Pan and Jang 2008); business to business (B2B) e-commerce (Teo et al. 2006); e-business (Zhu et al. 2003, Zhu and Kraemer 2005, Zhu et al. 2006b, Lin and Lin 2008, Oliveira and Martins 2010a); knowledge management systems (KMS) (Lee et al. 2009).”
Migrating to internet-based e-commerce: Factors affecting e-commerce adoption and migration at the firm level (2006, background): “A significant portion of revenue generated through the internet is an indication of the organization’s ability to leverage the internet [48].”
Toward a Deeper Understanding of System Usage in Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective (2007, neutral): “…computer technology is amongst the highest in the world” (Simon and Wardrop 2002) Like the trade press, IS researchers often write about collectives such as groups (Dennis et al. 2001; Easley et al. 2003), organizations (Devaraj and Kohli 2003; Zhu and Kraemer 2005), and even nations using systems.”
Determinant Factors of E-commerce Adoption by SMEs in Developing Country: Evidence from Indonesia☆ (2015, background): “The questionnaire was developed by reference to previous studies.”
How the Use of Big Data Analytics Affects Value Creation in Supply Chain Management (2015, positive): “Although the effects of competitive pressures on organizational IT adoption have been reported in extant studies [11, 76, 89, 90], with the exception of Liang et al.”