Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2025

Adopting digital innovations is crucial for companies in the context of digitalization as it enables them to adapt and reinvent their business models, processes, and products. This is vital for a company's long-term survival. Key questions arise regarding the antecedents of adoption, the decision-making process, implementation, and the role of partners such as stakeholders and individuals. Previous research has predominantly focused on adopting quantitative methods like regression and qualitative case studies. However, three types of research questions have been neglected so far. Firstly, general adoption research has not sufficiently cross-fertilized existing adoption models. Additionally, different stakeholders like customers have not been adequately considered. Secondly, within the context of digital innovation adoption, questions remain about the influence of specific digital characteristics, the resulting implications, and the interface between digital and sustainable trends. Thirdly, the configurational approach, mainly through qualitative comparative analysis, is gaining relevance as it allows for examining interactions and the interplay of various factors. Here, conjunction, asymmetry, and equifinality are essential in causal complexity.
This cumulative dissertation addresses these gaps through six papers that contribute to answering open questions in the three outlined areas. The dissertation begins with a review of innovation research, adoption research, and digital technologies. Building on this, I derive my research questions and provide an overview of the research methodologies used in this work. After an introduction of the individual articles, the second part contains the papers of the dissertation. Here, the articles compromise antecedents and preconditions of adoption, as well as internal and external factors influencing the adoption decision. The concluding epilogue highlights the key findings and discusses the contributions and implications.
By utilizing QCA, this dissertation can offer a new perspective on adoption research and provide detailed insights into the adoption process. It becomes evident that interconnections exist among individual factors and antecedents and in the interplay between adopting companies and partners, such as stakeholders and participants in co-creation processes. Furthermore, QCA demonstrates how adoption can be achieved and how individual companies and people make adoption decisions due to the interplay of different factors.