Antecedents of Incumbents’ Motivation and Ability to Utilize Disruptive Telemedicine Innovations

Incumbents’ inertia in the face of disruptive innovations has been emphasized in prior literature. Nevertheless, incumbents may be able to invest appropriately in these innovations if they possess the motivation and ability to do so. In this paper, we use three streams of research in order to investigate contextual, organizational, and individual antecedents of incumbents’ motivation and ability to adopt and use potentially disruptive digital innovations in health care: institutional theory, the resource-based view, and technology acceptance literature. We test the impact of various antecedents on the adoption and usage of telemedicine using a dataset of 9,196 European general practitioners. Our findings from logistic regressions suggest that only isomorphic pressure, complementary assets, and perceived output quality significantly influence both adoption and usage. Formal institutions and perceived usefulness yield ambiguous results. These findings provide important implications for future analyses of antecedents of incumbents’ response to disruptive innovations.