Innovation adoption across regions: psychological openness and the early diffusion of digital platforms

Abstract

Early regional adoption is crucial for platform-enabled innovations because their viability depends on enough people within a region adopting them to generate network effects. Existing research on regional innovation diffusion explains early adoption largely through demographic, economic, infrastructural, or institutional conditions, paying limited attention to regional population psychology. We conceptualize regional psychological openness as an invisible social infrastructure that is relevant for understanding early platform adoption. To test this idea, we introduce a newly curated dataset that allows us to trace the initial development of three major platform innovations (i.e., accommodation sharing platforms, ride-sharing platforms, social media platforms) across hundreds of U.S. metropolitan regions. Across all three platform types, regions differ markedly in early adoption. We link these adoption data to large-scale geo-referenced personality information from millions of U.S. residents ( N = 3,234,899). Results show that regional psychological openness consistently predicts earlier uptake even after accounting for demographic, socio-economic, social, infrastructural, geographical, and other psychological characteristics. In sum, the study advances a behavioral perspective on regional innovation adoption by integrating population psychology into explanations of platform diffusion.