This research focused on diffusion of innovation (DOI) in the area of software in information systems. And to study the factors influencing the innovation adoption rate of these software in this American Multi National Company (MNC) especially on the impact of change agents to improve this rate of DOI. The research tradition studied is in the area of IT software.
Parent literature in this research comes fundamentally from DOI. There are many scholarly articles in this area but primarily focusing on innovation adoption of consumer goods by Rogers (2005) and Holak & Lehman (1990). There have also been studies that relate the social behaviour of innovation adoption with consumer goods into the area of software innovation (Fichman 1992). This research further expounded on the literature by these scholars to focus on this MNC to address a specific problem of implementation of innovative software within the company.
This research adopted a descriptive study with some hypothesis testing to validate some of the relationships that occurred during the course of the study. These relationships were then studied quantitatively using a co-relational style of investigation. This was a field study on a non-contrived setting. In this MNC, the unit of study was of 3 types namely; Individual, Groups, and Country. This research was a cross-sectional study conducted over two months using an ordinal level of measurement. The research used a questionnaire-survey to collect the data using a one-dimensional Likert scaling technique to analyze the data.
The final summary modified some of the original literature available into one that suited this MNC at the point in time the survey was conducted (March to June 2011) and established correlations between independent factors that were not done widely before in this field.