Rajiv Kishore (Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology) had a paper, “Theorizing About the Early Stage Diffusion of Co-dependent IT Innovations,” accepted for publication by the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), which is listed as a top-tier “A+” journal in the Lee Business School’s SARS journal list.

This paper was co-authored with collaborators from SUNY Binghamton and Xiamen University, China. A co-dependent innovation, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is a type of IT-based innovation in which the overall innovation consists of two complementary parts (e.g,. RFID tag and RFID reader) that are adopted by two different adopter communities (e.g, manufacturers and retailers), but where both the parts need to be jointly adopted by members of the two adopter communities for successful diffusion of the overall innovation. Rooted in innovation diffusion, organizing vision, and institutional entrepreneurship theories, and an in-depth case study using 20 years of text and discourse data about Walmart’s campaign to promote RFID-in-retailing in the early stages of diffusion this technology, the paper develops a four-phase process model for the early-stage diffusion of co-dependent IT innovations, identifies the institutional entrepreneur who is likely to emerge to change the current institutional setup during each phase of the early diffusion process, and adds the notions of co-adopter relative advantage and internal-external influencers to the innovation diffusion literature.