Proceedings of 31st International Business Research Conference
27 - 29 July 2015, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
ISBN: 978-1-922069-80-1
A Cross Cultural Analysis of Service Innovation Adoption
Determinants: Mexico, China and the United States
David J. Smith
This study examines the adoption propensity of 1012 randomly selected firms from
Mexico, China and the United States. Inquiry is made regarding organizational and
managerial determinants of these firms. Two primary questions are addressed. What
determinants have the most impact on a firm’s propensity to adopt service innovations?
Second, what are the similarities and differences between the three countries? An
Artificial Neural Network is selected as the statistical method because of the different
perspective it provides for a highly non-linear function having many variables. It also
offers results that consistently prove to numerically approximate such functions much
easier than conventional methods, together with the ability to dependably and accurately
classify adoption membership while providing weighted analyses of input variables.
Findings suggest that each group's propensity can be consistently and accurately
identified and further suggest there are distinct differences in the determinants that
dominantly impact category membership, supported by differences in the feature
extraction phase of the neural network approach.
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David J. Smith, Palm Beach Atlantic University, USA