The Relationship between Innovation and Consumption of Internet Users

Abstract

The relationship between innovation and consumption among internet users is not uniform. This research shows different relationships between innovation and consumption in terms of the level of involvement in music from an internet survey of 1,000 music users. We measure the level of involvement in music using the two levels of components of involvement suggested by Lastovicka and Gardner (1979). For the analysis, we divide the samples into the “high involvement” and “low involvement” groups and examine each group for their relationship between innovation, indicated by “making one's own music and posting one's songs or performances on the internet,” and consumption, indicated by “average amount of money spent on music downloads per year.” The results show that there are heterogeneous characteristics among high and low levels of involvement groups in the aspects of consumption and innovation behavior. In the low involvement group, users actively innovating are also actively consuming. However, in the high involvement group, there is no clear relationship between innovation and consumption. To put it concretely, the consumption per innovating user is approximately four times more than that of non-innovating users in the low involvement group, but it is about the same in the high involvement group. In addition, the consumption per innovating user in the low involvement group is approximately two times more than that of innovating users in the high involvement group.