چکیده (انگلیسی):

Many organizations strive to improve performance by creating and marketing new products and/or
services. Understanding why some new products and services succeed while others fail is critical to
managers and marketing researchers. Diffusion of innovation theory addresses the reasons for, and
rate of, the adoption of new ideas, products, and services. This theory and its related constructs
have been successfully applied to new products while there has been less on emphasis on new
services such as educational innovations. Further, research of educational innovations, has focused
on adoption by teachers and administrators rather than students. This research study addresses this
gap by empirically investigating whether diffusion of innovation theory and constructs apply to
student adoption of new academic programs. The study involves surveying undergraduate students
from a northeastern college on their perceptions of newly launched and traditional majors. Survey
items are adaptations of previous scales as well as new items that relate to the new major decision.
The proposed scale utilizes innovation constructs of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity,
trialability, and observability. Study results suggest that the diffusion of innovation constructs apply
to the new major decision, but contrary to prior research some of the scales are mutli-dimensional
rather unidimensial as reported in prior studies. This research study provides useful scales that can
be used by marketing professionals and designers of new services, especially in the area of
education. Also, study results raises issue for the research community regarding stability of
innovation constructs in different settings