Understanding resistance to innovation

Media out­lets often report that French peo­ple are opposed to inno­va­tion. Recent exam­ples include fig­ures show­ing that only a small num­ber of peo­ple are will­ing to get vac­ci­nat­ed against Covid-19 or the con­tro­ver­sy around 5G net­works. But these atti­tudes are hard­ly sur­pris­ing when we look at research into resis­tance to innovation.

There are many exam­ples of prod­uct or ser­vice inno­va­tions that set off very strong resis­tance among poten­tial users. One inter­est­ing illus­tra­tion is the Linky smart elec­tric­i­ty meters that are being rolled out in France since last year. It’s not just house­holds that are wary of them, but also – and more sur­pris­ing­ly – local coun­cils, which usu­al­ly act as inter­me­di­aries to facil­i­tate the roll-out of inno­va­tions. Groups have formed to fight against and pre­vent these new meters from being imple­ment­ed across the coun­try. Mem­bers of this move­ment organ­ise protests, share tips on how to reject the instal­la­tion of a new meter, or restrict access to technicians.

These new-gen­er­a­tion meters show hour-by-hour con­sump­tion, allow remote oper­a­tions, and are pro­vid­ed for free. So, what explains this (some­times vio­lent) resis­tance, when the Linky meters per­form bet­ter in every way? Our research aims to under­stand the sources of resis­tance and how it’s expressed through local coun­cils – more than 1,000 have issued decrees against the new smart meters ¹.

A per­son may not have adopt­ed a prod­uct sim­ply because they were unaware of its exis­tence or characteristics.

Resis­tance goes beyond refus­ing to embrace inno­va­tion. A per­son may not adopt a prod­uct sim­ply because they don’t know it exists or what its fea­tures are. As such, some­times sim­ply try­ing out a new prod­uct can lead to users adopt­ing it.

The notion of “resis­tance to inno­va­tion” implies a con­scious deci­sion. Here, the per­son is mak­ing the choice not to adopt a new prod­uct or ser­vice. This resis­tance is grad­ual and can man­i­fest itself in a wait-and-see atti­tude where the per­son holds out for bet­ter terms and con­di­tions. This is the case when the con­sumer finds an inno­va­tion inter­est­ing but would rather wait for it to become wide­spread and adopt­ed by many before using it themselves.

In con­trast, resis­tance can be very vio­lent when the goal is to make an inno­va­tion flop. This phe­nom­e­non has a vari­ety of ori­gins, but there is a cer­tain cor­re­la­tion between the source and the inten­si­ty of the resis­tance. Resis­tance can come from iner­tia, for instance, the con­sumer feel­ing com­fort­able with their habits, dis­in­ter­est­ed in adopt­ing new prod­ucts or meth­ods. Worse still, the con­sumer might see an inno­va­tion as over­ly com­plex in some way, or sim­ply have a neg­a­tive image of it.

Anoth­er pos­si­ble source of resis­tance can be traced to the dis­rup­tion of norms or tra­di­tions through inno­va­tion, e.g. genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied pro­duce, which rais­es ques­tions about whether manip­u­lat­ing DNA is a social­ly accept­able prac­tice. Last­ly, the con­sumer may per­ceive cer­tain risks in adopt­ing the inno­va­tion. There are mul­ti­ple kinds of risks – risk to phys­i­cal safe­ty, eco­nom­ic risk (“If I spend the mon­ey on this prod­uct, will it be worth it? What are the poten­tial hid­den costs?”), func­tion­al risk (“Will the prod­uct real­ly per­form like it’s meant to?”) and social risk (“Will the peo­ple I hold dear see this inno­va­tion as a pos­i­tive thing?”).

As not­ed by Klei­j­nen et al. (2009), inno­va­tion that dis­rupts tra­di­tions and norms, when like­ly to involve phys­i­cal risk for con­sumers, is the most like­ly to encounter very strong, cult-like resis­tance ².

To find the sources of resis­tance to the Linky meters, we analysed around 500 local coun­cil reports and decrees enact­ed across France to delay or pre­vent them from being rolled out. Our results showed that, in addi­tion to believ­ing that meters didn’t improve things in any way, agents of resis­tance saw them as a source of a wide range of risks.

Our clus­ter analy­sis shows five kinds of coun­cils who each had very dif­fer­ent rea­sons for reject­ing, or at least delay­ing, the roll-out in their munic­i­pal­i­ty. Their argu­ments relat­ed to the tech­ni­cal fea­tures (lifes­pan, elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves) but also to the risks con­nect­ed to a dis­put­ed roll-out. This debate gave rise to forms of resis­tance that ranged from a mora­to­ri­um to a full ban. Some coun­cils focused on envi­ron­men­tal argu­ments relat­ing to replac­ing mil­lions of meters with ones for which the lifes­pan is poten­tial­ly three times short­er. Some high­light­ed the per­ceived risks due to fire, elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves or data breach. Oth­ers empha­sised risks of dis­tur­bance because some house­holds would not accept the roll-out. Oth­ers argued that replac­ing the meters should be the remit of coun­cils them­selves; or they brought up all these argu­ments and insist­ed that the new meters pro­vide no ben­e­fit to the end user.

The most pro­nounced forms of resis­tance came from coun­cils that invoked own­er­ship of the meters, and there­by banned the roll-out in their ter­ri­to­ry by munic­i­pal decree. This is just one exam­ple of how research into any inno­va­tion must include an in-depth analy­sis of con­sumer per­cep­tion and behav­iour. Oth­er­wise, there’s a risk of encoun­ter­ing a very high lev­el of resis­tance, no mat­ter the lev­el of tech­no­log­i­cal prowess pre­sent­ed by their innovation.