How do innovators adopt radical innovations from new technology ventures?

Although the technology adoption/diffusion model is widely used as a framework for explaining and predicting the adoption of innovations attention for the specific circumstances under which innovators adopt radical new products from new technology ventures is scant and represents a gap in the literature. At the earliest stage of development of an innovation, product categorization may still be open for discussion, technical and social norms still absent, and the survival of the new technology venture may be uncertain. As a result, innovator-customers face the difficult and rather lonely task of evaluating a fuzzy innovation and innovation context. Based on these observations we aim to extend adoption theory to better fit this early stage of market diffusion by developing a framework that explains the role of reference customers and opinion leaders in innovator customers' adoption process. Drawing on a socio-cognitive perspective of the marketplace and organizational ecology we explain the mechanisms at work and use information seeking theory to develop propositions for future testing. We use our insights to develop an agenda for future research in this area.