Innovation adoption research has demonstrated that organizational features
and perceived benefits of innovations play significant roles in explaining
organizational-level decisions to adopt new technologies. Beyond such motiv
ations, however, social pressures operating at the interorganizational leve
l have been proposed to influence the decision to adopt innovations, even w
ithout regard to any proven or anticipated benefit from the innovation itse
lf To empirically determine the influence of organizational features, perce
ived benefits, and social pressures on organizations' innovation adoption d
ecisions, this study examined the decisions of 288 organizations to adopt I
nternet websites. Organizational social pressures were found to be the most
significant discriminators of adopters and nonadopters, although they were
not particularly important in predicting the likelihood of future adoption
for those organizations currently without websites. This finding suggests
that social pressures are significant in innovation adoption, but that they
may have their strongest effect during the early phases of innovation diff
usion. Organizational features and perceived benefits were also reasonable
discriminators of adopters and nonadopters as well as effective predictors
of the likelihood of adoption far nonadopters. To a lesser degree, these fa
ctors were also predictive of the stage of adoption for those organizations
that have already adopted websites.