The Role of Product Originality,Usefulness and Motivated Consumer Innovativeness in New Product Adoption Intentions

Prior research has posited that product attributes are primary drivers of success that a firm must consider to develop a competitive advantage. Two product attributes, originality and usefulness, have been identified in the literature as significant dimensions of new product success. Customer demands differ, and more purchase intentions toward a new product depend on how consumers connect the product attributes to their own individual characteristics. Studying motivated consumer innovativeness as a personality trait may improve our understanding of the motivations for adopting innovations; however, questions remain regarding whether the effects of originality and usefulness on consumers' intentions to adopt are different when levels of these attributes are matching or dissimilar and what the relationship is between these effects and motivated consumer innovativeness. This study seeks to empirically investigate these effects and their relations by collecting data from 560 potential consumers in China. This paper uses hierarchical regression analysis to test hypotheses in four product domains as representative of higher or lower levels of usefulness and originality. The research shows that new product originality affects consumers' intentions to adopt new products only if it matches the level of new product usefulness. The results also reveal that motivated consumer innovativeness has a positive moderating role on the relationship between new product originality and consumers' new product adoption intentions when both attributes are at a lower level. The theoretical and practical implications for new product development and marketing communications are discussed.     

Commercializing new technologies: consumers' response to a new interface

Successful commercialization of new technologies is the riskiest and most rewarding form of new product development activity. New technologies are often commercialized using innovative interfaces that determine how consumers interact with a new product to obtain its functionality. Consumers' perception of uncertainty about the performance of a novel interface is a key issue in the acceptance of new products involving new interfaces. Specifically, when firms commercialize a new interface, they face two major challenges: First to identify the optimal functionality for the new interface, and second, to effectively communicate with consumers in order to reduce uncertainty about the performance of the new interface and increase adoption intentions. Despite the theoretical and managerial importance of research on consumers' response to a novel interface, very little empirical research has been conducted in this area. Building on prior research on new product development, human‐computer interaction, and consumer decision‐making, this article examines the factors that influence consumers' judgments of uncertainty about the performance of a new interface and consumers' adoption intentions. Specifically, we conducted an experiment to investigate the effect of the newness of the functionality of a new product and the effect of imagery on consumers' uncertainty about the performance of a novel interface and consumers' adoption intentions. Our results show that consumers perceive lower uncertainty about the performance of a new interface and higher intentions to adopt a new product when the new interface is introduced with a new (vs. pre‐existing) functionality. Furthermore, our results suggest that when a new interface is introduced with a new functionality, imagining the product in use increases consumers' uncertainty about the performance of the new interface and decreases their intention to adopt the new product. In contrast, when a new interface is introduced with a pre‐existing functionality, imagining the product in use decreases consumers' uncertainty about the performance of the new interface and increases their intention to adopt the new product. Our findings provide valuable guidelines for marketers in formulating new product development and communication strategies for new products involving a new interface. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

Looking Innovative: Exploring the Role of Impression Management in High‐Tech Product Adoption and Use

Although consumer adoption of high‐tech innovations is certainly influenced by the product's functional benefits, can the use of a new product confer social benefits as well? Specifically, can the mere use of an innovative product convey the impression that the user is an innovative person? Impression management (IM) is a well‐established phenomenon in social psychology that refers to the human tendency to monitor, consciously or unconsciously, the efficacy of his or her communication of self to others. This research explores the role that IM motivations, or “looking innovative,” play in consumers' use of new high‐tech products, especially in the workplace—an environment in which innovativeness is clearly valued by employers and, thus, individuals have strong motivations to convey innovativeness as a personal characteristic. Data from both ethnographic and experimental methods demonstrate that (1) the use of new high‐tech products can be a surprisingly effective social signal of one's “tech savvy” and personal innovativeness; (2) this impression even significantly increases positive evaluations of secondary traits such as leadership and professional success; and (3) this effect differs by gender. Intriguingly, stronger benefits accrue for women than for men—a finding that runs counter to the backlash effect typically found in IM research in business settings (i.e., female job evaluations typically suffer after engaging in the same self‐promoting IM strategies that benefit their male counterparts). Further, the data show that, even for professional recruiters, a momentary observation of a job candidate using a new high‐tech product versus a low‐tech equivalent significantly increases the candidate's evaluation and likelihood of being hired.     

Seeking the Ideal Level of Design Newness: Consumer Response to Radical and Incremental Product Design

To develop successful new products, new product development managers need to have a thorough understanding of the consumer adoption process, specifically in how consumers evaluate new products. This research examines the value of product design for consumers' evaluation of radical and incremental innovations. The primary goal was to empirically test how design newness affects consumer response to product innovations. Design newness (also referred to as novelty or atypicality) is defined as the deviation in a product design from the current design state of a certain product category. Although prior research has suggested that higher levels of design newness may have a positive effect on consumers' evaluations of new products, higher levels of design newness may also have negative consequences for consumer response to radical innovations. An experimental context (n = 130) using systematically designed products for three product categories was used to test how consumers respond to high and low levels of design newness for both radical and incremental innovations. The findings show that for radical innovations, embodying the product in a design with a low (versus high) level of design newness led to more positive evaluations and less learning‐cost inferences. Because the functional attributes of a radical innovation are incongruent to existing products, consumers find it difficult to access the relevant product category schema in order to transfer knowledge to the new product. Because of this poor knowledge transfer, consumers may feel that they lack the ability to make effective use of the radical innovation, resulting in greater learning costs. In this case, a product design with a low level of design newness can provide consumers with a frame of reference for understanding the radical innovation. Contrasting this result, no difference was found between a low and a high level of design newness for incremental innovations. For incremental innovations, by definition the functional attributes characteristic to the innovation are highly comparable with those products that are already stored in consumers' memory. Thus, there is no need for an additional reconfirmation of the preexisting schema through product design, and consumers are able to access the relevant schema regardless of the level of design newness inherent in the product. These findings are integrated into a discussion of the managerial implications and the potential avenues for future research.     

How Do Consumer Characteristics Affect the Bias in Measuring Willingness to Pay for Innovative Products?

Getting the price right is essential for successful new product introductions. An accurate estimate of consumers' willingness to pay is a crucial part of this task. Measurement of willingness to pay for innovations, however, often yields biased results. In this paper, we investigate consumer‐related characteristics and motives that might underlie this bias. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model, we develop a conceptual model to identify consumer characteristics relevant for preference measurement for innovative products. In doing so, two main factors that potentially influence hypothetical bias are distinguished: ability and motivation. Our conceptual discussion and empirical results demonstrate that the validity of willingness to pay statements is higher among consumers who show a high ability to assess the new product's utility and who are truly interested in purchasing the new product. Counter to intuition, willingness to pay statements from innovators, consumers with good product category knowledge, or consumers who perceive the new product to be highly innovative are relatively more biased and should be interpreted with caution. This research is among the first to look at consumer characteristics rather than methodological issues when it comes to measuring consumer willingness to pay for innovative products. Our conceptual discussion and empirical examination of the drivers of hypothetical bias can be used to refine the validity of the results of the direct willingness to pay approach. These findings should help improve new product pricing surveys and open new avenues for research in measuring consumer preferences.     

Never Forget Where You're Coming from: The Role of Existing Products in Adoptions of Substituting Technologies

The adoption of technological product innovations has received considerable attention among academics and practitioners alike, although the circumstances in which a new technology seeks to replace an existing product have remained largely overlooked. Research into the adoption of substituting technologies should incorporate this perspective, which provides insights into how technology adoption depends on the existing situation. From this perspective, the authors investigate how consumers' emphasis on an existing product's attributes influences their adoption of a substituting innovation. Data obtained from 217 respondents indicates that consumers' liking of an existing product's attributes can prompt a negative affective reaction to the substituting technology. This negative affective reaction in turn may lead to less positive cognitive evaluations of the substituting technology and affect consumers' adoption intentions. This investigation complements existing research in two important ways: First, the results emphasize the importance of taking existing products into account when studying the adoption of substituting technologies. Second, this study adds to the sparse findings regarding the link between affect and cognition in technology adoption contexts.     

Incorporating Network Externalities into the Technology Acceptance Model*

Research on network externalities has identified a number of product categories in which the market performance of an innovation (e.g., unit sales and revenues) is an increasing function of that innovation's installed base and the availability of complementary products. Innovation scholars have attributed these findings to the positive impact of network externality variables on consumer perceptions of innovation attributes. This paper provides the first empirical examination of these perceptual linkages by extending the Technology Acceptance Model to include consumer perceptions of network externality variables. The authors hypothesize that, when direct and indirect network externalities exist, consumer purchase intentions and consumer perceptions of an innovation's usefulness and ease of use will positively reflect perceptions of installed base size and the availability of complementary products. To test this reasoning, the authors developed new measures of consumer perceptions of network externality variables. These measures were incorporated into a survey that explored the attitudes in Japan of potential adopters toward digital music (DM) players at an early stage in the product life cycle. Findings reveal a direct positive relationship between ease of use and the perceived availability of digital music. The authors also find positive and significant relationships between both purchase intention and perceived usefulness and (1) the perceived size of the DM player installed base and (2) the perceived availability of digital music. An application of the Baron‐Kenny test for mediating variables reveals that (1) ease of use partially mediates the relationship between the perceived availability of digital music and perceived usefulness and (2) perceived usefulness partially mediates the relationship between the perceived availability of digital music and purchase intention. The research has important implications for future research on new product adoption and for the management of innovations that involve network externalities. The conceptual model provides a framework for testing alternative explanations of observed variations in the impact of network externalities within and across product categories. The empirical analysis provides guidance for managers who wish to manage the impact of network externalities on adoption. In addition to stimulating the size of the installed base and the variety of complementary products, executives must also manage consumer awareness of network externality variables and consumer understanding of the relationship between those variables and innovation attributes. Finally, traditional adoption models link consumer adoption decisions to perceptions of innovation attributes. The findings provided here imply that predictive accuracy of these models can be improved by including consumer perceptions of network externality variables.     

Using Product Bundling to Facilitate the Adoption Process of Radical Innovations*

Generally, radical innovations are not easily adopted in the market. Potential adopters experience difficulties to comprehend and evaluate radical innovations due to their newness in terms of technology and benefits offered. Consequently, adoption intentions may remain low. This paper proposes bundling as an instrument to address these problems. More specifically, this paper examines how consumer comprehension, evaluation, and adoption intention of radical innovations may be enhanced by bundling such products with existing products. In addition, it is argued that the proposed effects are contingent upon the level of fit perceived to exist between the radical innovation and the product that accompanies it in the bundle. Furthermore, consumers' prior knowledge may affect the influence of bundling on the innovation adoption process as the interpretation of the meaning of new products may be strongly related to prior knowledge. This study therefore investigates whether consumer prior knowledge has such a moderating effect. Hypotheses are tested by means of an experimental study with three different radical innovations and distinguishing among offering the radical innovation separately, offering the radical innovation in a bundle with moderate perceived fit between the products, and offering the radical innovation in a bundle with high perceived fit between the products. Results show that product bundling enhances the new product's evaluation and adoption intention, although it does not increase comprehension of the radical innovation. Moreover, the results show that comprehension, evaluation and adoption intention of the innovation significantly decrease when consumers perceive a moderate fit between the products in a bundle. Taken together, these findings contribute to the bundling literature by showing not only that product bundling may indeed be an effective instrument to introduce a radical innovation but also that product bundling may be counterproductive when ignoring the critical role of perceived product fit as core characteristic of a product bundle. In addition, the notion that product bundling helps to enhance the evaluation and purchase intention of new and relatively complex products suggests a suitable strategy for new product managers to enhance benefits and reduce learning costs for radical innovations. Moreover, the effects of bundling on consumer appraisals of radical innovations are also shown to depend on the level of knowledge respondents possess regarding the product category of the radical innovation. More specifically, if bundled with a familiar product, novices tend to evaluate the innovative product more positively, but for experts no such effect can be detected. As such, these results provide additional specific implications for managers when introducing radical innovations in the market. Offering a radical innovation in a product bundle could be a fruitful strategy for companies that target customers with little or no prior knowledge in the product domain.     

The Importance of an Innovative Product Design on Customer Behavior: Development and Validation of a Scale

The importance of innovative product design (IPD) has increased in recent years because customers' decision‐making factors have changed from product price to product design. However, a definition and measurement of IPD have not been developed adequately. Building on the customer perspective, this study defines IPD and develops its standard measurement with three product design attributes: aesthetics, features, and ergonomics. Results of the empirical test indicate strong evidence for the reliability and validity of the measurement. Overall, this study shows that our measurement captures unique customer perceptions on product innovativeness from the product design. Additionally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Consumer Response to Product Form in Technology‐Based Industries

Product design is a key driver of competitive advantage and new product success. Relative to its importance, product design remains an underresearched area. The authors address this issue by examining the moderating effects of consumer innovativeness and design acumen on consumer response to product form—i.e., the product's visual appearance. Using subjects from the United Kingdom, these effects were tested with a technology‐based product that is expected to be introduced to market in the near future. A technological innovation was chosen because such products are often characterized by an accelerating pace of innovation and shortening life cycles. In such contexts, the product's visual appearance is often critical to success because it drives inferences about the technical capabilities and functional novelty. Our findings indicate that for more innovative consumers, an innovative product form can further enhance perceived value, product liking, and purchase intention. Furthermore, for consumers who possess more design acumen, an innovative product form can increase perceived value and product liking. An innovative product form was not found to enhance purchase intention for consumers with higher levels of design acumen. A primary implication of the study is to consider target market characteristics such as consumer innovativeness and design acumen when selecting a product form strategy. Additional implications include involving consumer innovators in the development and evaluation of product forms and involving consumers with greater design acumen early in the product's introduction so that they may influence other buyers.     

Information,Promotion, and the Adoption of Innovative Consumer Durables*

The diffusion of innovative new products is critically dependent on the transmission of relevant information to potential adopters. Existing research indicates that the relative effectiveness of different communication tools depends on the type of information being communicated. Written and verbal communication tools can be effective when consumers make adoption decisions based on search attributes. However, when adoption depends on experience attributes, marketers must find ways to effectively expose consumers to these attributes. In this paper the authors explore the effectiveness of promotional incentives in motivating consumers to engage in behaviors that should increase their understanding of an innovation's experience attributes. To the authors' knowledge, the research described here is the first published study of the relative effectiveness of different promotional vehicles in stimulating adoption of a consumer durable. The empirical analysis is based on data collected in a real‐world experiment involving 614 households. Just over half of these households received a free DVD movie disc as an incentive to participate in the study. The authors assigned the participating households to four treatment groups of 100 households each and a control group of 214 households. The households in the treatment groups received one of four promotional offers that featured some form of a $50 monetary incentive. These promotional offers differed in the degree to which they encouraged behavior that exposed consumers to the experience attributes of a DVD player. After one month the authors surveyed these households again to determine how many purchased a DVD player in the preceding month. An analysis of this experimental data reveals that all four monetary promotions significantly enhanced the probability of adoption. In particular, the average adoption rate among the households receiving one of the monetary incentives was 41%. In contrast, none of the households in the control group reported purchasing a DVD player. Promotions that paid consumers for specific behaviors that precede purchase were no less effective than a coupon that reduces the purchase price by an equivalent amount. In addition, promotions that directly exposed consumers to experience attributes were more effective than promotions that simply provided consumers with the opportunity to learn about experience attributes. Finally, the gift of a free complementary product (a DVD movie) enhanced the effectiveness of three of the four monetary promotions. The authors close with a discussion of managerial implications and directions for future search.     

On the diffusion of electronic commerce

This paper analyzes retailers' adoption of e-commerce in a technology adoption race framework. An internet-based firm with no traditional market presence competes with an established traditional firm to adopt the e-commerce technology and sell to a growing number of consumers with on-line shopping capability. The focus of the analysis is on identifying how consumer loyalty, differences in firms' technology and consumers' preferences for the traditional versus the virtual market, and the expansion in market size made possible by the internet can affect the timing and sequence of adoption by firms, as well as the post-adoption evolution of prices. The model's implications are used to discuss empirical evidence on adoption patterns for different product categories and firm types.     

Consumer Innovativeness and the Use of New versus Extended Brand Names for New Products*

Despite the importance of branding to new product success, little research has been conducted on how individual adoption orientation might affect brand name preferences. This paper draws on the diffusion literature to investigate how consumer innovativeness affects consumer response to alternative branding strategies (i.e., new vs. extended brands, for new products). The results of an empirical study found that consumer innovativeness has a greater effect on new product evaluations for new brand names relative to extended brand names. Also, results indicate that highly innovative consumers evaluate new products with new brand names more favorably than brand extensions. Furthermore, consumer confidence in the new product was found to mediate the effects of consumer innovativeness and its interaction with brand name type on new product evaluation. Implications include not only giving greater managerial consideration to using new brands but also supporting the chosen branding strategy with appropriate promotional efforts for respective adopter groups.     

What about Passive Innovation Resistance? Investigating Adoption‐Related Behavior from a Resistance Perspective

Adoption literature has been dominated by a novelty‐seeking paradigm, whereas resistance to innovation has received considerably less attention as a means to explain and predict adoption‐related behavior. The lack of a good metric to assess consumers' predisposition to resist innovations has prevented the establishment of a common ground for empirical research and thus hampered progress to date. This paper develops and empirically validates a scale to measure individual differences in consumers' predisposition to resist innovations (hereafter, passive innovation resistance, or PIR). The proposed instrument entails a personality‐specific and situation‐specific measure that assesses individual differences in consumers' predisposition to resist innovations, emerging from their inclination to resist changes and exhibit status quo satisfaction. The scale represents a measure of the generic tendency to resist innovations and thus captures the notion of a general disposition to act in a consistent way in various situations. The results of multiple studies show that the PIR scale has good psychometric properties, and its relationships with other constructs conform to theoretical expectations. Furthermore, the PIR scale explains and predicts adoption‐related behaviors beyond the variance accounted for by traditionally investigated constructs such as innate innovativeness, big‐five personality dimensions, or demographic variables. These results clearly reveal the importance of PIR for determining adoption‐related behavior but contest a conceptualization of constructs that tap only novelty seeking at a high level as the direct antecedent of adoption. Research that attempts to explain and predict adoption‐related behavior can benefit from taking a resistance perspective as well.     

It Won't Fit! For Innovative Products,Sometimes That's for the Best

The degree of overlap (i.e., fit) between product development organizations' resources and the product development projects pursued has powerful performance implications. Drawing on organizational learning theory and the resource‐based view, this research conceptualizes and empirically tests the interrelationships between the levels of fit, innovativeness, speed to market, and financial new product performance. After reviewing the research literature relevant to resource fit and new product performance, the level of innovativeness is posited to be an important moderating and mediating factor, which is validated by analysis of data gathered from 279 product developing firms. Technological fit has a negative direct effect on both technological and market innovativeness, while the use of existing marketing resources (i.e., a high degree of marketing fit) positively impacts technological innovativeness. This suggests, consistent with findings from market orientation research, that a deep, long‐held customer understanding can promote technological innovativeness. The moderating hypotheses proposed are also well supported: First, a high degree of marketing fit has a more positive impact on performance for market innovative products (e.g., products which address a new target market or use a nontraditional channel for the firm). Drawing on a deep customer understanding is more critical to performance for market innovative products. Conversely, the benefits of marketing fit are limited where market innovativeness is lacking. Interestingly, the counterpart moderating role of technological innovativeness on technological fit's performance effect is not significant; the level of technological innovativeness does not significantly impact the performance impact of technological fit. There are also significant moderating effects across dimensions. Our results show that the financial benefit of using existing marketing resources is lessened for technologically innovative products. Technological innovations necessitate drastic adaptation of marketing resources (i.e., channel and brand); firms drawing only on existing marketing resources for a technologically innovative new product will incur reduced profit. Similarly, the positive implications of using existing technological resources are limited for products which are highly market innovative. Generally, resource fit is seen to have an (oft‐overlooked) dark side in product development, though several of our findings suggest that marketing resources are more flexible than are technological resources.     

Extending Lead‐User Theory: Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Lead Userness*

Lead users are found to come up with commercially attractive user innovations and have been shown to be a highly promising source of innovation for new product development tasks. According to lead‐user theory, these users are defined as being ahead of an important market trend and experiencing high benefits from innovating. The present article extends lead‐user theory by exploring the antecedents and consequences of consumers' lead userness in the course of three studies on extreme sports communities. Regarding antecedents, it uncovers that field‐related variables (consumer knowledge and use experience) as well as field‐independent personality variables (locus of control and innovativeness) help explain an individual's lead userness. These variables might therefore be used as a proxy to identify the rare species of lead users. With regard to consequences, it uncovers that lead users demonstrate innovative behavior not only by creating new product ideas but also by adopting new commercial products more heavily and faster than ordinary users. This highlights the idea that lead users might not only be valuable to idea‐generation processes for radically new concepts; instead, they might also be relevant to more general issues in the marketing of new products.     

Determinants of Innovative Durables Adoption

This research uses innovation characteristics to assess product potential at two points in time. The two phases of the study consist of: (1) proposing and estimating purchase intention models and (2) reconciling predicted success with actual product performance. The investigation focuses on the impact of perceived product attributes, environmental variables, and consumer traits on the purchase intention of actual innovations within several technologically intensive product categories. Differences in model specification and parameter values are noted across product types. Results indicate consistency in the impact of product attributes across categories on an innovation's acceptability, but suggest differences in model specification with respect to environmental variables and consumer traits. The existence of a generic-to-specialized innovation continuum is a possible cause of the heterogeneity in results across products. An ex post analysis of the innovations indicates that, while success can be predicted quite accurately using perceived product attribute ratings, consumer and environmental variables should not be ignored for particular categories. The study has implications for the early screening of innovative durables, specifically with respect to forecasting model potential, determining product design and positioning, and developing promotional messages.     

Enhancing Concept Test Validity by Using Expert Consumers

In standard concept testing practice, consumers may be invited to participate in a test if they use or possess the product. However, merely using or possessing a product is no guarantee that a consumer has the level of product knowledge that is necessary for judging the concept. Conducting a concept test with consumers who lack the necessary product knowledge may jeopardize the validity of the test results. That is, the results of such a concept test may not accurately indicate how consumers will evaluate the real product. To ensure the validity of concept test results, Jan Schoormans, Roland Ortt, and Cees de Bont suggest that consumers who are invited to participate in a concept test should possess a degree of product knowledge. When a consumer is asked to evaluate a concept, their product expertise allows them to understand product information faster, fill in missing information, and learn more easily. Consumers with product expertise are better able to discriminate between important and unimportant aspects of a product. They are also better able to infer benefits from a product's physical attributes. To explore the effects of consumer expertise on the quality of the evaluations provided by concept tests, the authors conducted two experiments, both of which resemble actual concept tests. The first experiment examines the effect of consumer expertise on the results of a concept test for a major innovation, Videotext. This experiment tests the hypothesis that the similarity between the evaluations of a concept and an actual product will be greater for consumers with a high level of product-category expertise than for consumers with low product-category expertise. The results of the experiment clearly support the idea that product-category expertise enhances a respondent's ability to evaluate concepts in a test of major innovations. From this, it is concluded that only respondents with high product-category expertise should be used for concept tests of major innovations. The second experiment explores the effects of product expertise on consumers' evaluations of a minor innovation, a redesigned coffee maker. This experiment tests two hypotheses. First, it is proposed that consumers with high product expertise give more consistent evaluations in a concept test than consumers with low product expertise. Second, it is suggested that consumers with product expertise generate more stable evaluations over time than consumers without product expertise. The results of this experiment clearly indicate that using consumers with moderate to high levels of product expertise is beneficial to the validity of the results from concept tests of minor innovations.     

How to Overcome Pro‐Change Bias: Incorporating Passive and Active Innovation Resistance in Innovation Decision Models

Adoption literature is largely subject to a pro‐change bias; researchers mainly assume that consumers are open to change and thus interested in evaluating new products. However, consumers often reject innovations without considering their potential, such that the adoption process ends before it really has begun. The present study instead argues that innovation resistance, prior to product evaluation, is a regular consumer response that must be recognized and managed to facilitate new product adoption. The authors suggest differentiating passive from active innovation resistance. While passive innovation resistance results from a consumer's generic predisposition to resist innovations prior to new product evaluation, active innovation resistance is an attitudinal outcome that follows an unfavorable new product evaluation. This study also extends extant innovation decision models by describing how passive and active innovation resistance emerge and how they affect decision‐making in later stages of the process.     

Individual antecedents to consumer intention to switch to food waste bioplastic products: A configuration analysis

Food waste management remains a significant economic and sustainability problem and is being actively addressed by scholars, governments, and organizations around the world. Bioplastics, which are biodegradable plastics derived from food waste, are a recent innovation that might contribute to managing this waste in a more sustainable manner. Unfortunately, many of today's consumers are not necessarily ready to consider such alternatives. Consumer switching to sustainable products is a tenuous topic, as consumers often value other product attributes (i.e., cost, quality, and associated prestige) more than their sustainability attributes (i.e., fewer natural resources expended, lower carbon footprints, and end-of-life recoverability). A greater understanding of consumers' intention to switch to bioplastic products provides opportunities for firms to develop state-of-the-art, profitable, and sustainable food systems. Considering the complex set of inter-relationships surrounding consumer involvement in sustainable innovations and associated supply chain strategy, this research leverages complexity theory and a qualitative comparative analysis research approach to uncover eight different, yet equifinal, configurations of antecedents that motivate consumer intention to switch from new plastic products to equivalent products made from bioplastics.