A review of the three streams of consumer innovativeness

Researchers are grouped in one of three streams in looking at consumer innovativeness. The first one defines consumer innovativeness as a general trait that applicable across different product category. The second one defines consumer innovativeness as category-specific predisposition that is not transferrable to other categories. The third one combines the two previous perspectives by taking the general characteristic of individual in innovation adoption and category-specific factors that will moderate the role of general innovativeness in the adoption process. In this paper we review each stream in order to develop an understanding on how to connect those streams to better predict product adoption by consumers.