The Role of Experience in Discontinuance of IT Innovations

While a number of different studies have explored the domain of adoption of IT innovations, factors leading to discontinuance of IT innovations have been sparsely explored. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining the role of experience in the discontinuance of IT innovations. We focus on a very narrow segment of IT innovations; namely IT applications and their discontinuance by the end users. Drawing upon research done in marketing, we present the case that experience with a product as in a software application may play an important role in the end user’s decision to discard or adopt the software application. Thus regardless of how functionally advanced and beneficial the application might be, limited experience on part of the end users may lead them to underestimate the overall value of the innovation and in turn lead them to discard an otherwise beneficial innovation. We suggest that discontinuance is most likely to occur when experience with an IT innovation is at a superficial level, while adoption is most likely to occur when the innovation is an integral part of the end user’s needs. Organizational implications on how end users can be prevented from discarding IT innovations are presented