ORIGINAL PAPER
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial
Orientation
Seongbae Lim • Silvana Trimi • Hong-Hee Lee1
Received: 21 January 2010 / Accepted: 16 September 2010 / Published online: 7 October 2010
© Springer-Verlag 2010
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Web 2.0 service adoption and
entrepreneurial orientation (EO). For this purpose, this article conducted multivariate analysis of variance
(MANOVA) using Web 2.0 service adoption groups (high and low adopters) as an independent variable and
EO as dependent variable, measured with four variables: innovativeness, risk taking, autonomy, and
competitive aggressiveness. The results show that there are significant differences in EO, overall and for each
dimension, between the two groups (high adopters/low adopters of Web 2.0). High adopters of Web 2.0 have
a stronger EO in terms of all the four of the individual EO dimensions.
Keywords Web 2.0 · Service adoption · Entrepreneurial orientation · Social networking ·
Innovativeness
1. Introduction
Web 2.0 that emphasizes ‘‘collaboration,’’ ‘‘participation,’’ and ‘‘openness’’ has been recently expanded, and
related services have been broadly adopted worldwide not only by individuals but also by organizations.
1
S. Lim
Bill Greehey School of Business, St. Mary’s University, One Camino Santa Maria,
San Antonio, TX 78228, USA
e-mail: slim1@stmarytx.edu
S. Trimi (&)
Management Department, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0491, USA
e-mail: strimi@unlnotes.unl.edu
H.-H. Lee
School of Business and Economics, Dankook University,
126, Jukjeon-dong, Suji-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do 448-701, Korea
e-mail: honglee@dankook.ac.kr
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial orientation
Companies are deploying Web 2.0 technologies, such as micro blogging, social networking, wikis, and
internal blogging, because they can dramatically improve decision cycle times, organizational effectiveness,
innovation, etc. Web 2.0, and soon Web 3.0, appears to have become the new paradigm which brings
fundamental changes to the internal corporate value chain and their relationship with customers. Furthermore,
it is also changing the nature of competition by restructuring the industry value chain. For example, the
traditional framework that assumes clearly demarcated roles between producers and consumers can no
longer be used to analyze the industry value chain since a consumer can simultaneously be also a producer.
App Store, Linux, Wikipedia, and youtube.com are good examples. On the other hand, entrepreneurship
education for college students has been built to emphasize as a venue for educating young people who can
create their new ventures to boost the national economy in the future. Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has
been identified as a fundamental factor that influences how entrepreneurship translates into action (Lee S,
2000). While entrepreneurship is related to ‘‘desire’’ for launching a venture firm, EO is directly related to
actual behavior and can be a critical factor for successful venture creation. Previous studies regarding the
individual adoption of information technology (IT) have focused on such non-personal, non-intrinsic factors as
‘‘ease of use, perceived usefulness, benefits, social norms,’’ and so on. Considering that Web 2.0 is a new
paradigm of voluntary collaboration, participation, and openness by individuals, it would be appropriate and
meaningful that we look at Web 2.0 adoption related to the adopters’ personal characteristics, such as EO.
Thus, in this study we proposes that there is a relationship between adoption of Web 2.0 service and EO
because both Web 2.0 and EO function based on a strong ‘‘bottom up’’ rather than ‘‘top down’’ type structure.
2. Theoretical background and research model
2.1 Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a new trend of creative utilization of web technologies rather than a specific technology or service.
It does not coincide with any brand new or revolutionary technical innovation (Kim D, 2009), but instead uses
a broad range of different technologies, applications, and functions for interactivity, networking, or user
integration (Mrkwicka K, 2009).
Depending on the domain under investigation, previous studies have defined Web
2.0 differently. (et, 2006) believed that Web 2.0 is a philosophy that emphasizes collective intelligence,
collaboration, and community services. (Anderson, 2007) suggested individual production and user
generated content, harnessing power of the crowd, data on epic scale, architecture of participation, network
effect, and openness, as the ideas behind Web 2.0. (McAfee, 2007)introduced improved collaboration,
innovation, and connectivity as main benefits of using Web 2.0 services. Castelluccio (2008) suggested the
collaborative environment and dependence on user created content as characteristics of Web 2.0. Cooke and
Buckley (2008) viewed Web 2.0 as a set of tools that allows individuals to publish, share, and collaborate.
(Kim D, 2009) suggested participation, collaboration, rich user experience, social networking, semantics, and
interactivity as characteristics of Web 2.0. (Mrkwicka K, 2009) also viewed Web 2.0 as an enabling platform
200
for user participation that focuses on philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence, dynamic
information sharing, and creation. Since Web 2.0 has been defined in diverse ways and often as a collection
of new phenomena, there is no measurement for Web 2.0 acceptance or adoption. This study attempts to use
individuals’ adoption behavior of Web 2.0 services as a measurement for Web 2.0.
2.2 Entrepreneurial orientation
(Miller, 1983) introduced the original framework of EO which included as dimensions of measuring
entrepreneurship: innovation, proactiveness, and risk taking. Several subsequent studies used these three
dimensions ((Slevin, 1989) ; (Dess, 1996) ;(Lee S, 2000) ;(Kreiser PM, 2002); (Tarabishy A, 2005)). In a
later study, (Dess, 1996) distinguished EO as the process, practice, and decision making activity that lead to
new venture entry. In addition to the previous three dimensions of EO (innovativeness, risk taking, and
proactiveness), they introduced two other dimensions: autonomy and competitive aggressiveness. These five
dimensions of EO can be defined as follows:
(1) Innovativeness Tendency to engage in, and support new ideas, novelty, experimentation, and creative
process which may result in new products, services, or technological processes.
(2) Proactiveness Taking initiatives by anticipating and pursuing new opportunities and by participating in
emerging markets.
(3) Risk taking Willingness to incur heavy debt or make large resource commitments for the purpose of
seizing opportunities in the market place for high returns.
(4) Autonomy The independent action in bringing forth an idea or a vision and carrying it through to
completion.
(5) Competitive aggressiveness Propensity to directly and intensely challenge its competitors to achieve entry
into or improve positions in the marketplace and outperform industry rivals.
(Lee S, 2000), adopting the same five dimensions introduced by (Dess, 1996) , characterized EO as the
process in which entrepreneurship is undertaken in terms of the methods, practices, and decision making
processes for new entry into the market. In this study, we adopt (Dess, 1996) definition of EO. However,
(Slevin, 1989) used the same items to measure both proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness since the
characterization of these dimensions significantly overlaps. We also agree with this approach, thus in this
study we excluded ‘‘proactiveness’’ and used only four dimensions to measure EO: autonomy,
innovativeness, risk taking, and competitive advantage.
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial orientation
2.3 Web 2. 0 and relationship of entrepreneurial orientation
(Castelluccio, 2008) emphasized that Web 2.0 has restructured the vertical structure of the traditional client–
server/consumer–provider universe into a horizontal structure, where any consumer of content/information
can also be a provider. In an organizational environment, (Chui M, 2009) compared the adoption behaviors of
Web 2.0 technologies and enterprise systems application (ERP, CRM, and SCM), as summarized in Table1.
As shown in the table, while the adoption of enterprise systems is the result of top-down decision making, the
adoption of Web 2.0 service is voluntary, bottom-up, that engages a broad base of workers. Thus, adoption of
Web 2.0 services is a result of strong horizontal culture. Horizontal culture encourages entrepreneurial
behaviors. This means that there could be a relationship between Web 2.0 adoption and EO, which is the
intention of this study.
3. Research methodology
3.1 Research design and methodology
The proposed research model of this study is shown in Fig1. This study investigates the relationship between
Web 2.0 adoption and EO. For the independent variable, Web 2.0 adoption, we divided the respondents into
two groups: high and low adopters based on the average adoption score of five selected social networking
services (SNS). As for the dependent variables, EO, we used the four previously discussed dimensions:
autonomy, innovation, risk taking, and competitive aggressiveness. In this study, we could not include all
kinds of Web 2.0 services, especially when even its definition is not clear, among many types of Web 2.0
services. Thus, we focused on only one, SNS which is the most popular Web 2.0 service and used by both
individuals and organizations. We used SPSS 15.0 for the statistical analysis of this study.
Table 1 Adoption behaviors of enterprise systems and Web 2.0
Enterprise systems application
Web 2.0 service
Users assigned by
User groups can be
management
formedunexpectedly
Users must comply with
Users engage in a high
rules
degree of participation
Degree of technology
Often complex technology
Technology investment
complexity
investment
often a light weight overlay
Adoption decision
Mindset expected
to existing infrastructure
202
Entrepreneurial Orientation
Autonomy
Risk taking
Web 2.0: High Group
Low Group
Innovativeness
Competitive
Aggressiveness
Fig. 1Research model for MANOVA analysis
3.2 Instrument design and sample group
Data were collected from college students in South Korea, since the country is the world leader in terms of the
Internet infrastructure and its applications to ubiquitous life and e-business (Lee, 2003). Because data
collection from students was administrated during the class, we had 100% response rate: we gave out and
collected 223 questionnaires.
The questionnaire items for measuring EO dimensions and SNW were developed based on a thorough review
of previous studies and interviews with ten practitioners involved in Web 2.0 services. The first draft of the
questionnaire was developed as a mixture of items: to measure EO dimensions, items were taken from
(Dess, 1996); and to measure Web 2.0 usage focusing on SNS, items were developed by authors of this
study. Then, we conducted three pilot tests and significantly revised the questionnaire. The final version of the
questionnaires was distributed to the sample groups.
3.2.1 Independent variable: Web 2.0 adoption
Since the five questions to measure SNS adoption were developed by the researchers, an exploratory factor
analysis, and reliability analysis were conducted to confirm the unidimensionality of variables. As shown in
Table2, no problem was found in terms of construct validity. Cronbach’s a value was .85 satisfying the
reliability test. We used the average score of the five questions about SNS adoption which was used to divide
the respondents into two groups: high and low adopters of Web 2.0.
3.2.2 Dependent variable: entrepreneurial orientation (EO)
The questionnaire included 16 questions, based on previous studies, to measure:
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial orientation
(1) Innovativeness (2) risk taking (3) autonomy, and (4) competitive aggressiveness.
Table 2 Result of factor analysis for Web 2.0
Factor
Eigen
Variable
value
1
3.132
I like to make friends through SNS
I am actively involved in a web-based virtual
Factor
Operational
loading
definition
.806
Web 2.0 service
adoption
.769
service adoption community which is built around
common interest such as games, sports, music,
health, and life style
I am actively involved in a web-based virtual
.832
community which is built around the same affinity
such as religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, and geographical location
I like to upload my own stories, pictures, and
.815
videos on the web sites to share them with online
friends
I enjoy sharing my own writings with online friends
.731
Table 3 Result of factor analysis for EO
Factor
Eigen
Variable
Factor
Operational
loading
definition
I often think about inventing newproducts
.803
Innovation
I like to work where new ideas that I suggest will be
acted upon by decision makers
.735
I consider myself as a creative person
.614
I don’t like conformists
.734
I would choose to invest money in an
entrepreneurial business as opposed to a more wellknown business
.704
I would say that I am rather adventurous and daring
.580
I am persistent about completing projects
.545
I generally feel I am in charge of my own fate
.857
My family and friends tend to see me as taking the
.867
value
1
2
3
4.604
1.314
1.094
Risk raking
Autonomy
initiatives
4
1.042
I want to be near the top of my class
.528
Competitive
aggressiveness
204
I enjoy playing sports or games with people
.807
aggressiveness who are little better than I am
I enjoy competing and doing things better than
.789
someone else
For each question, a five point Likert type scale was used (1. strongly disagree, 2.disagree, 3. neither agree
nor disagree, 4. agree, and 5. strongly agree). We ranexploratory factor analysis where four factors were
extracted and used to measure the dimensions of EO as shown in Table3.
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial orientation
4. Result and discussion
4.1 Demographic characteristics of respondents
Regarding demographic characteristics of the sample group, 65% of the respondentswere male students and
62% were majoring in business. As shown in Table4, a majority of the respondents were junior level students.
4.2 MANOVA analysis
4.2.1 Correlation among factors
Before conducting MANOVA, correlation analysis was conducted among thedependent variables to check
whether MANOVA was a proper tool for analyzingthe data. As shown in Table5, MANOVA can be used since
the four dependent variables showed significant relationships among them.
4.2.2 Equality of covariance and error variance
Box’s M test was conducted to test the equality of covariance matrices between thetwo groups of low and high
Web 2.0 service adopters. As seen in Table6, the result(.058) was not significant, meaning that covariance
matrices of the dependentvariables are equal across the groups, and therefore MANOVA analysis
isacceptable.
Table 4 Student class ofrespondents
Class
Frequency
Percent
Cumulative percent
Freshmen
38
17
17
Sophomore
38
17
34.1
Junior
104
46
80
Senior
31
14
94
Graduate student
12
6
100
Total
223
100.0
Table 5Correlation among dependent variables
Innovativeness
Risk Taking
Autonomy
Competitive aggressiveness
Inoovativeness
1
.474*
.214*
.655*
Risk Taking
.407*
1
.665*
.654*
206
Autonomy
.408*
.562*
1
.665*
Competitive aggressiveness
.409*
.645*
.236*
1
* P\.05
Box‘s M 18.174
Table 6 Box’s test of equalityof covariance matrices
F
1.4889
df1
10
df2
2225456666261.5
Sig.
.0589
4.2.3 Web 2.0 and EO (overall)
First, we tested the relationship between EO as a single factor (not divided into thefour dimensions) and Web
2.0 adoption (divided into two groups: high and lowadopters). As shown in Table7, all the relevant values
including Pillai’s Trace,Wilks’ Lambda, Hotelling’s Trace, and Roy’s Largest Root were significant at the 01
level meaning that there is a significant difference in terms of EO between thetwo groups, the high and low
Web 2.0 adopters.To see if there was any violation of this MANOVA test, we used Levene’s test ofequality of
error variances. The results of the test, presented in Table8, show thatthe assumption of the equality of the
error variance of the two groups of thedependent variable was violated in two of the EO dimensions,
autonomy, andcompetitive aggressiveness (P\.05). However, the failure to meet the assumptionof equality of
error is not critical to this MANOVA test, since the score was not very low and the sample size of the two
groups was similar.
4.2.4 Web 2.0 and EO in each dimension
The univariate test was conducted to measure the difference between the twoadoption groups of Web 2.0 and
each of the four dimensions of EO. As presented in
Table 7 Result of MANOVA test
Effect
Web 2.0
** P<.01
Valur
F
Hypothesis df
Error df
Sig.
Pillai‘s Trace
.070
4.125
4000
218.000
.003**
Wilks‘ Lambda
0.48
4.125
4000
218.000
.003**
Hotelling‘s Trace
0.55
4.125
4000
218.000
.003**
Roy‘s Largest Root
0.44
4.125
4000
218.000
.003**
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial orientation
Table 8 Levene’s test of equality of error variance
Levene statistic
df1
df2
Sig.
Innovativeness
.048
1
221
.225
Risk taking
.008
1
221
.665
Autonomy
4.454
1
221
.335*
Competitive
3.5574
1
221
.26644*
aggressiveness
* P<0.05
Table 9Result of univariate test
Source
Dependant variable
Type III sum
df
Mean Square
F.
Sig.
Web 2.0
Innovativeness
2.535435
1
2.554
3.395
.030*
Risk taking
2.64568
1
6.224
69.6
0.66*
Autonomy
47.4654
1
9.225
6.66
0.33**
Competitve
23.325
1
6.526
5.33
0.99**
aggressiveness
* P<0.05, ** P<0.01
Table 10Descriptive statistics
Innovativeness
Risk Taking
Autonomy
Groups
Mean
Std. Deviation
N
Low adopter
3.6435
.9555
103
High adopter
3.6435
.9855545
125
Total
3.9564
.8455
124
Low adopter
3.4694
.59545554
354
High adopter
3.42585
.595542
424
Total
3.2159
.64544
897
Low adopter
3.98446
.5454
656
High adopter
3.4715
.554444
654
Total
3.5855
.55544144
889
208
Competitive
Low adopter
3.6855
.5486544
663
aggressiveness
High adopter
3.9965
.69644
568
Total
3.8565
.6944
887
Table9, the results show that significant differences are found in all the four dimensions of EO (the risk taking
dimension was at the .1 level of significance).
As shown in Table10, the high adopter group showed higher mean values thanthe low adopter group
consistently across all the four dimensions of EO. The gapbetween the two groups was larger for autonomy
and competitive aggressiveness as expected according to the MANOVA test results.These results suggest
that high adopters of Web 2.0 have higher EO than lowadopters. Furthermore, high Web 2.0 adopters showed
a stronger mindset forinnovation, risk taking, autonomy, and competitive aggressiveness than low adopters.
5. Discussion and conclusions
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between EO and Web2.0 service adoption. For
this purpose, we measured the students’ adoption of Web2.0 service by focusing on SNS and measured their
EO in four dimensions. Theresult of this study showed that there were significant differences in EO, overall,
andfor each dimension, between the high adopters and low adopters of Web 2.0. Weopters.can therefore
conclude that students who adoptWeb 2.0 are more entrepreneurialthan those who do not. This result
provides important implications for practitioners and managers.Since the advent of Web 2.0 technologies and
services, organizations havefocused mainly on consumers’ adoption of Web 2.0 services and their behavior
onthe social networking sites. These approaches have provided organizations with newinsights for
understanding consumer behavior in the virtual space. Thus, they have been able to leverage social
networking sites for more effective customerrelationship management, marketing and public relations.
On the other hand, organizations have been much more resistant in adopting andallowing usage of SNS by
their employees. Reasons for this are often cited as:reduced productivity, security issues, reputational risk,
wasted bandwidth (cost), tomention just a few. However, the benefits from internal SNS usage for
theorganization can be far greater. SNS can effectively connect employees andknowledge workers, and
organizations can use SNS as a tool for innovation andbusiness process improvement. Web 2.0 tools can
improve organizational performanceby expediting the internal flow of knowledge and help generate
innovativeideas much faster, because they effectively link employees across the organization (departments
and geography), as well as with external collaborators.
IBM, for example, has created an internal social networking site, Beehive, whichencourages communication
within the organization. In Beehive, 60,000 employees exchange their ideas to create knowledge.
Furthermore, it provides valuablementorship connections for employees who need new knowledge by
Web 2.0 service adoption and entrepreneurial orientation
analyzingcontents, human networks, and many other topics in the site (What’s a friend worth?,
2009).
As in the IBM case, an internal social networking site can become an effectivetool for internal collaboration
and innovation. Thus, the issue for organizationsshould not be if but how can they encourage their employees
to participate in theorganization’s internal social networking sites. Traditional adoption factors forenterprise
information systems, such as ease of use and perceived usefulness, wouldnot work as effectively for SNS
adoption because those factors were validated foradoption of information systems based on management
decisions. SNS adoption isan individual and voluntary decision by each employee, not a managerial
decision,and it supports horizontal communication across the organization. Thus, we need tofind other
meaningful factors influencing employees’ decision to participate in internal SNS.
The results of this study strongly suggest that adoption of internal SNS, amongother benefits, can be an
important factor for improving organizations’ entrepreneurialculture. Encouraging employees for active
participation in SNS canstrengthen horizontal communication and collaboration culture in the
organization,thus boosting EO (in all its dimensions: innovation, risk taking, autonomy, andcompetitive
aggressiveness). This in turn will shorten innovation life cycles anddecision making and increase the
competitiveness of the organization. Creatingextensive internal and external networks will bring not only more
opportunities butalso more risk which will require real entrepreneurial skills, thus further intensifying the
importance of developing EO culture by organizations.
210
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