Consumer Adoption of Pro-poor Service Innovations in Subsistence Marketplaces

Despite some extant research on innovation adoption in subsistence marketplace contexts, little is known about subsistence consumers and how they evaluate so-called pro-poor innovations. This research identified six existing, empirically tested, and well-cited innovation adoption models and collected data on them within a subsistence context. Extending existing research, data was collected across two separate and distinct pro-poor services targeted at the subsistence segment, and structural models were compared based on mediating relationships. This research contributes to the subsistence marketplace literature by providing guidance about how antecedents within these models affect subsistence consumers’ evaluations of pro-poor service innovations in this increasingly important context. The research provides novel practical and theoretical insights through the development of new, testable hypotheses in the area and explores the effect of service type and geographic area (urban versus rural).