Development of a Scale for Innovativeness

Abstract

This paper describes the construction of a scale to measure innovativeness—a psychological trait underlying adoption of new ideas, services and products. The study utilizes as a model a psychometric methodology that has demonstrable power in personality scale construction in order to demonstrate its potential for use in marketing research. Four steps were gone through in applying the model to innovativeness: (1) defining the trait, (2) creating a large pool of items based on that definition, (3) utilizing techniques for suppression of response bias to select the best items in terms of a validity/reliability criterion, (4) evaluation in terms of convergent and discriminant validity. A fifth criterion, predictive validity, awaits future developments.