Affordable innovation rejection attitudes: conceptualisation, scale development, and validation

Affordable innovations, which serve consumers with a low willingness or ability to pay, are a means to address grand challenges while also generating economic value. However, less is known about how managers’ and decision makers’ individual-level preferences and attitudes for or against affordable innovation hinder their development. Hence, in addition to identifying and conceptualising the affordable innovation rejection (AIR) attitudes of decision makers as a major obstacle, this study proposes a scale to measure them. Specifically, with a series of qualitative and quantitative studies, this research develops and validates a parsimonious psychometric scale that can measure decision makers’ AIR attitudes. The resulting six-item scale is based on a tripartite AIR conceptualisation, which proves valid in terms of convergent, discriminant, experimental, nomological, predictive, and test–retest reliability. The proposed research agenda in turn details some possible applications of this scale.