Fashion Tech Adoption by Micro Fashion Retailers: An Innovation Pipeline Analysis of Technology Transfer from Academia to Business

Responding to Tan et al.’s (2009) call for further research on the enactment of innovation and technology adoption within the small business environment and Grant and Perren’s (2002) call for greater paradigmatic variety in the study of small business, in which existing literature is predominantly positivistic, this qualitative study documents the socially constructed reality of multiple actors within an innovation pipeline (Massa and Testa 2008) for a product visualisation technology for online fashion retailing. Fashion became the fastest growing and most popular category of consumer goods bought online in the UK (Mintel 2012), but suffers from a high product return rate (Ratcliff 2014), largely due to the lack of try-on, touch and feel possibilities. Advances in image interactivity technology (IIT) such as 360° spin, zoom, catwalk videos and virtual fitting rooms enable fashion retailers to provide consumers with enhanced visual information to evaluate the properties of the item online and reduce perceived product risk (Blazquez 2014; Kim and Forsythe 2009; McCormick and Livett 2012; Merle et al. 2012). However, small fashion retailers may become caught between the ‘hard place’ of limited resources, which prevents them from investing in such innovative website technology, and the ‘rock’ of increasing expectations for website capability amongst consumers, whose appetites for and expectations of online shopping are stimulated by the activities of larger businesses with greater resources.