The influence of environmental and organizational factors on innovation adoptions: Consequences for performance in public sector organizations

Although technical and administrative innovations have received much academic interest in recent years, our understanding of why some organizations adopt these innovations and others do not is still underdeveloped. This paper examines organizational and environmental factors that may explain the adoption of innovations in public sector organizations. Furthermore, how technical and administrative innovations affect firm performance is also examined. Regarding organizational factors, we analyze strategy and firm size. Regarding environmental factors, we analyze the effect of uncertainty and market concentration. Hypotheses are developed and tested using a combination of archival and survey data from the public healthcare sector. Our results suggest that environmental and organizational factors have inconsistent effects on the adoption of administrative and technical innovations in public sector organizations. Our findings also show that high adopters of both types of innovations are more sensitive to environmental factors than organizational factors. Furthermore, our paper shows that organizations that combine technical and administrative innovations increase their performance. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.