Individual Innovativeness Scale (IS)

Abstract

The Individual Innovativeness Scale (IS), developed by H. Thomas Hurt, Katherine Joseph, and Chester D. Cook (1977), is an established 20-item psychometric self-report instrument designed to evaluate an individual's generalized willingness, orientation, and behavioral predisposition toward embracing novel ideas, practices, and technological innovations. Rooted in the foundational diffusion of innovations paradigm articulated by Everett M. Rogers, the scale operationalizes innovativeness as a pervasive personality construct that precedes specific adoption decisions across diverse technological, educational, and organizational domains. The scale utilizes a 5-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree) and incorporates 12 positively keyed items reflecting curiosity, opinion leadership, and cognitive flexibility alongside 8 negatively keyed items capturing skepticism, traditionalism, and cognitive inertia. Psychometric assessments consistently demonstrate high internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients regularly spanning between .88 and .94 across diverse collegiate, organizational, and cross-cultural cohorts. Structural and factor-analytic studies substantiate either a robust unidimensional construct—representing global innovativeness—or an interpretable two-factor oblique structure comprising "Openness to Experience/Leadership" and "Reluctance/Risk Aversion." Criterion and construct validity have been confirmed through positive correlations with ambiguity tolerance, generalized self-efficacy, risk propensity, and technological adoption speed, alongside negative associations with dogmatism, communication apprehension, and resistance to change. The instrument employs an additive scoring algorithm with a baseline constant ($II = 42 + \text{Positive Items} – \text{Negative Items}$), producing a continuous index that directly categorizes respondents into Rogers' classic five adopter tiers: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards/Traditionalists. This article provides a definitive psychometric overview of the scale, detailing its theoretical foundation, structural validity, scoring parameters, and research applications.

Keywords

Individual Innovativeness Scale, Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers, Psychometrics, Technology Adoption, Opinion Leadership, Change Orientation, Construct Validity, Factor Analysis, Openness to Change

Authors

The Individual Innovativeness Scale was authored by H. Thomas Hurt, Katherine Joseph, and Chester D. Cook. At the time of the scale's development and publication in 1977, the authors were affiliated with the Department of Speech Communication at West Virginia University (Morgantown, West Virginia, USA). The research program was conducted in close collaboration with the influential communication scholar James C. McCroskey, who served as a primary collaborator in organizational communication metrics and subsequently hosted and preserved the scale within the West Virginia University Communication Research Measures repository.

Purpose

The Individual Innovativeness Scale was formulated to address a foundational methodological challenge in communication science, organizational psychology, and sociology: the need for an efficient, valid, and reliable measure of an individual's generalized, latent propensity toward adopting innovations prior to, and independent of, the introduction of any specific product, ideology, or technological system. Before the publication of the scale by Hurt, Joseph, and Cook in 1977, researchers investigating the diffusion of innovations typically assessed innovativeness post hoc. Investigators recorded the historical chronological date at which a consumer, physician, or farmer purchased a piece of machinery, prescribed an antibiotic, or adopted an agricultural technique. This retrospective methodology suffered from severe empirical limitations: it was vulnerable to memory distortion, confounded an individual's psychological willingness with socioeconomic access or capital, and could not be employed prospectively to anticipate how human groups would react to planned organizational, educational, or technological transformations.

Recognizing these limitations, Hurt, Joseph, and Cook conceptualized individual innovativeness as a stable, underlying trait of personality characterized by an openness to new experiences, cognitive independence, and a low threshold for tolerating the ambiguity associated with novel behaviors. The primary purposes of the instrument include:

• Predictive Assessment of Adoption Latency: Providing researchers and change agents with a standardized baseline index to forecast the rapidity with which individuals within an institutional or social system will adopt proposed reforms, educational technologies, or managerial practices.
• Identification of Opinion Leaders: Differentiating early adopters and opinion leaders from systemic traditionalists. Early adopters serve as critical sociometric nodes capable of legitimizing systemic change, whereas traditionalists may require tailored interventions, reassurance, or specialized training.
• Diagnostic Tool in Organizational Development: Enabling organizational consultants, educational administrators, and human resource professionals to map the psychological readiness for change across teams, departments, or entire workforces before launching systemic restructuring or technological overhauls.
• Empirical Research in Communication and Technology: Facilitating academic inquiries into how personality dimensions intersect with mediated communication, computer-mediated interaction, resistance to change, consumer behavior, and instructional technology adoption.

By measuring this construct as a generalized psychological orientation rather than a concrete, domain-specific behavior, the scale provides a versatile instrument that remains psychometrically sound across evolving eras of technological innovation—ranging from early mainframe computing and telecommunications systems to contemporary artificial intelligence, cloud enterprise tools, and virtual learning environments.

Psychological Construct

The construct of individual innovativeness represents a generalized predisposition toward organizational, conceptual, and technological novelty. Within psychometric theory, innovativeness occupies an intersection among personality psychology, cognitive style, and social communication theory. Rather than measuring technical skill or domain-specific knowledge, the Individual Innovativeness Scale operationalizes the psychological balance between two competing behavioral and cognitive drives: the drive toward exploration, originality, and leadership versus the drive toward caution, normative conformity, and structural preservation.

Core Dimensions of the Construct

Although frequently deployed as a global, unidimensional index, comprehensive psychological analyses reveal that the 20 items of the scale tap into several interrelated psychological sub-constructs:

• Openness to Cognitive and Experiential Novelty: The baseline inclination to seek out unfamiliar stimuli, engage with untested perspectives, and derive intrinsic stimulation from intellectual experimentation. Captured by items such as "I enjoy trying new ideas" and "I seek out new ways to do things," this facet reflects high tolerance for experiential variance and shares conceptual boundaries with the broader Five-Factor personality domain of Openness to Experience.
• Cognitive Improvisation and Ambiguity Tolerance: Innovations inherently involve ambiguity, uncertain outcomes, and non-linear troubleshooting. Items such as "I frequently improvise methods for solving a problem when an answer is not apparent" and "I am challenged by ambiguities and unsolved problems" assess an individual's resilience when encountering ill-defined cognitive demands. Rather than experiencing anxiety when procedures fail, innovative individuals perceive unsolved problems as energizing challenges.
• Opinion Leadership and Social Influence: Innovativeness within social systems does not occur in social isolation; it is deeply tied to interpersonal communication networks. Items such as "My peers often ask me for advice or information" and "I feel that I am an influential member of my peer group" measure sociometric centrality and the respondent's self-efficacy as an informal opinion leader whose behavioral endorsements carry social weight.
• Resistance to Normative Dependency (Counter-Skepticism): The negative pole of innovativeness is characterized by normative dependency—the requirement that an innovation be universally validated by the collective before one will risk personal adoption. Items such as "I rarely trust new ideas until I can see whether the vast majority of people around me accept them" and "I must see other people using new innovations before I will consider them" measure an individual's reliance on social proof and aversion to non-conformity.
• Traditionalism and Cognitive Inertia: Reflected in items such as "I tend to feel that the old way of living and doing things is the best way" and "I am suspicious of new inventions and new ways of thinking," this facet captures active institutional conservatism, nostalgia, and psychological defensiveness against perceived threats to familiar behavioral patterns.

Theoretical Framework

The Individual Innovativeness Scale is grounded primarily in the Diffusion of Innovations Theory articulated by sociologist Everett M. Rogers (1962, 1995, 2003). Rogers conceptualized diffusion as the process through which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. A foundational component of Rogers' paradigm is the proposition that members of any social collective do not adopt innovations simultaneously; instead, their adoption latency follows a normal, bell-shaped distribution when plotted over time.

Rogers classified social system participants into five distinct ideal-type adopter categories based on relative time of adoption, determined mathematically by the mean ($ar{x}$) and standard deviation ($sd$) of the adoption distribution curve:

1. Innovators (2.5%): Venturesome risk-takers who possess high financial liquidity, understand complex technical concepts, and can cope with high levels of uncertainty. They function as systemic gatekeepers who import ideas from outside the social boundary.
2. Early Adopters (13.5%): Respected, integrated opinion leaders. Potential adopters look to early adopters for advice and subjective evaluations of innovations. They hold the highest degree of opinion leadership in most systems.
3. Early Majority (34%): Deliberate adopters who interact frequently with peers but rarely hold formal leadership positions. Their adoption period is longer than that of innovators and early adopters, serving as an essential bridge in the diffusion process.
4. Late Majority (34%): Skeptical individuals who adopt new ideas just after the average member of the social system. Adoption is often driven by economic necessity or mounting peer pressure rather than intrinsic enthusiasm.
5. Laggards / Traditionalists (16%): Individuals who base their cognitive frame of reference on historical precedent. They possess virtually no opinion leadership, are socially isolated, and exhibit suspicion toward innovations and change agents.

Hurt, Joseph, and Cook (1977) translated Rogers' sociometric classification into a psychological measurement framework. While Rogers viewed innovativeness primarily as an observable behavioral outcome (time of adoption), Hurt and colleagues posited that there exists an underlying, stable psychological trait—termed individual innovativeness—that drives an individual into one of Rogers' five categories.

Furthermore, the theoretical framework incorporates elements of Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986) and early trait-state personality paradigms. An individual's self-reported innovativeness reflects their internalized sense of agency, creative self-efficacy, and perceived vulnerability to social sanctions. Individuals who perceive themselves as competent problem solvers and opinion leaders possess the self-efficacy required to deviate from institutional norms and experiment with untested methodologies.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Individual Innovativeness Scale has been rigorously evaluated across academic, organizational, and healthcare contexts over more than four decades.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was initially established by Hurt, Joseph, and Cook (1977) through systematic correlational analyses with established psychological constructs. The authors demonstrated that individuals scoring high on the scale exhibited statistically significant positive correlations with:

• Tolerance for Ambiguity: Assessed via standard clinical instruments, confirming that innovative individuals experience less cognitive discomfort when encountering complex, unstructured, or ambiguous situations ($r = .42$ to $.56, p < .001$).
• Generalized Self-Efficacy and Self-Esteem: Corroborated by positive correlations with self-perceived competence and social confidence ($r = .38$ to $.49$).
• Opinion Leadership: Positive associations with Rogers and Cartano's Opinion Leadership Scale ($r = .52$ to $.68$), confirming that the self-reported leadership items accurately mirror sociometric prominence.
• Openness to Experience: Subsequent personality research aligning the scale with the Five-Factor Model has consistently demonstrated moderate-to-strong convergent validity with the Openness to Experience domain ($r = .51$ to $.63$), particularly the facets of Openness to Ideas and Openness to Actions.

Discriminant Validity

The scale effectively differentiates innovativeness from unrelated or antithetical psychological traits. Extensive empirical studies have verified:

• Dogmatism and Rigidity: Significant negative correlations with Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale ($r = -.45$ to $-.58$), confirming that high scorers possess lower ideological rigidity and lower resistance to belief revision.
• Communication Apprehension: Significant inverse relationships with McCroskey's Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24; $r = -.34$ to $-.46$), indicating that innovative individuals experience lower social anxiety when interacting in groups, meetings, and public forums.
• Anxiety and Neuroticism: Negligible to weak correlations with generalized trait anxiety, establishing that innovativeness is distinct from clinical emotional stability and represents an independent cognitive-behavioral style.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

Predictive validity is evidenced by the scale's ability to forecast tangible adoption behaviors across varied populations:

• Educational Technology Adoption: In longitudinal assessments of primary, secondary, and post-secondary educators, baseline scores on the scale significantly predicted the speed, breadth, and sustained integration of computer-assisted instruction, classroom management software, and virtual learning environments ($R^2$ ranging from .18 to .34, $p < .001$).
• Organizational Process Innovation: Within corporate settings, high-scoring employees and managers generate a significantly higher volume of accepted workplace suggestions, patents, and workflow improvements compared to low-scoring counterparts.
• Consumer and Healthcare Adoption: Studies evaluating the uptake of novel pharmaceutical therapies among medical practitioners found that physicians scoring in the "Innovator" and "Early Adopter" ranges prescribed newly approved therapeutic agents substantially earlier than those in the "Late Majority" or "Laggard" categories.

Reliability

The Individual Innovativeness Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse participant demographics and administrative modalities.

Internal Consistency

In the original validation study conducted by Hurt, Joseph, and Cook (1977), which included separate samples of public school teachers ($N = 231$) and undergraduate college students ($N = 431$), the instrument demonstrated an overall internal reliability estimate (Cronbach's alpha) of $lpha = .89$ to $.94$.

Subsequent psychometric investigations have mirrored these findings across multiple contexts:

• McCroskey and colleagues consistently reported alpha coefficients exceeding $.90$ in studies evaluating instructional communication and organizational climates.
• Cross-cultural adaptations translated into Turkish, Spanish, Korean, and German have yielded Cronbach's alphas ranging reliably between $.84$ and $.92$, indicating that the balanced mix of positively and negatively worded items preserves scale coherence across languages.
• Composite reliability ($
  ho_c$) computed via structural equation modeling regularly exceeds the conservative psychometric threshold of$.80$, typically hovering around$.88$ to $.91$.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments over test-retest intervals spanning 3 to 8 weeks have documented product-moment correlation coefficients ($r_{tt}$) ranging from $.80$ to $.88$, indicating that the construct measured by the scale functions as a durable individual difference characteristic rather than a transient, state-dependent affective fluctuation.

Standard Error of Measurement (SEM)

Across non-clinical adult populations, the Standard Error of Measurement is approximately $SEM = 2.4 \text{ to } 3.1$ scale points. Given the broad possible score range (20 to 100 points), this relatively low standard error affords researchers high confidence when categorizing respondents into Rogers' five discrete adopter classifications.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Individual Innovativeness Scale has been the focus of ongoing methodological evaluation, centering on whether the instrument is fundamentally unidimensional or multidimensional.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the foundational EFA performed by Hurt, Joseph, and Cook (1977) using principal components analysis with varimax rotation, the 20 items were derived from an initial pool of 53 candidate items. Items were retained only if they loaded heavily on the primary general innovativeness dimension (loadings $ge .45$) and exhibited minimal cross-loadings on secondary residual factors (cross-loadings $le .25$). The scree test and eigenvalue criteria strongly supported a dominant general factor accounting for a substantial proportion of the total item variance (greater than 40%).

Subsequent exploratory examinations using oblique rotations (such as Promax or Direct Oblimin) typically reveal two primary, intercorrelated latent factors:

1. Factor 1: Willingness to Innovate / Leadership Orientation: Comprising the 12 positively keyed items (e.g., Items 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19). Factor loadings for these items typically range from $.48$ to $.78$.
2. Factor 2: Reluctance / Traditionalism / Risk Aversion: Comprising the 8 negatively keyed items (e.g., Items 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20). Factor loadings for these reverse-scored items typically range from $.44$ to $.74$.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Contemporary psychometric studies utilizing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) have compared three competing factor structures:

• Strict Unidimensional Model: Posits that all 20 items directly reflect a single global latent construct of innovativeness. This model often yields moderate fit indices ($\chi^2/df pprox 3.2 – 4.5$, $CFI pprox .86 – .89$, $RMSEA pprox .07 – .09$) due to method effects associated with reverse-worded items.
• Two-Factor Oblique Model: Separates items into "Openness/Leadership" (12 items) and "Resistance/Skepticism" (8 items), allowing the two latent factors to correlate negatively ($r pprox -.55$ to $-.72$). This model yields superior fit indices ($\chi^2/df pprox 1.8 – 2.4$, $CFI ge .94$, $TLI ge .93$, $RMSEA pprox .045 – .058$, $SRMR le .05$).
• Bifactor Model: Incorporates a single global innovativeness factor explaining common variance across all 20 items alongside two orthogonal group factors capturing item-wording method variance. Methodologists frequently recommend the bifactor or unidimensional interpretation for applied researchers, as the global score reliably reflects overall behavioral innovativeness.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Individual Innovativeness Scale is a self-administered, 20-item psychometric assessment structured as follows:

• Instrument Type: Self-report psychological scale / continuous inventory.
• Item Count: 20 items.
• Response Anchors: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neutral (Undecided)
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Item Polarity:
  • Positively Keyed Items (12 items): 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19.
  • Negatively Keyed / Reverse-Scored Items (8 items): 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20.
• Administration Duration: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult working populations. Requires an approximate 6th-grade reading level.
• Scoring Procedure: The instrument uses a standardized formula with a balancing constant to ensure that all computed scores fall along a continuous theoretical range from 14 to 94 (or approximately 20 to 100 depending on sample variances):
  • Step 1: Calculate the sum of the raw scores for the 8 negatively keyed items (Items 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 17, and 20). Call this value $\text{Total}_{\text{Step 1}}$.
  • Step 2: Calculate the sum of the raw scores for the 12 positively keyed items (Items 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, and 19). Call this value $\text{Total}_{\text{Step 2}}$.
  • Step 3: Compute the global Individual Innovativeness score ($II$) using the authentic formula:
    
    $II = 42 + \text{Total}_{\text{Step 2}} – \text{Total}_{\text{Step 1}}$
• Classification and Adopter Categories: Based on historical normative distributions aligned with Rogers' diffusion model, total scores are classified into five categorical profiles:
  • Scores > 80: Innovators (approx. top 2.5% of sample; venturesome, autonomous, experimental).
  • Scores 69 – 80: Early Adopters (approx. next 13.5%; opinion leaders, receptive, influential).
  • Scores 57 – 68: Early Majority (approx. 34%; deliberate, pragmatic, requires demonstrable utility).
  • Scores 46 – 56: Late Majority (approx. 34%; skeptical, cautious, adopts via social pressure or necessity).
  • Scores < 46: Laggards / Traditionalists (approx. lowest 16%; past-oriented, suspicious of novel interventions).
• Generalized Interpretive Benchmarks: In general organizational and communication research:
  • Individuals scoring above 68 are classified as High in Innovativeness.
  • Individuals scoring below 64 are classified as Low in Innovativeness.
  • Scores between 64 and 68 represent an average or transitional level of innovativeness.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Individual Innovativeness Scale was formally published in 1977 in the peer-reviewed journal Human Communication Research. The instrument was developed within an academic research context and was subsequently placed into the public domain for scholarly, instructional, and non-commercial research purposes by the authors and their associated research archives (including the widely utilized measurement repositories curated by Dr. James C. McCroskey at West Virginia University).

Licensing and Usage Guidelines:

• Scholarly and Research Use: Researchers, graduate students, and academic faculties may administer the scale without paying royalty fees or obtaining formal written permission, provided that appropriate bibliographic attribution is given to the original authors (Hurt, Joseph, & Cook, 1977).
• Commercial and Proprietary Use: Commercial entities, corporate consultancies, or commercial testing platforms seeking to monetize the scale or bundle it into proprietary software systems should evaluate fair use limitations and seek appropriate legal consultation regarding the intellectual property rights associated with the publishing journal and author estates.
• Digital Archive: Historical digital archives of the measurement tool and its official scoring protocol are maintained on the academic repository: James C. McCroskey Measurement Tools Archive.

References

• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Goldsmith, R. E., & Hofacker, C. F. (1991). Measuring consumer innovativeness. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 19(3), 209–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02726497
• Hurt, H. T., Joseph, K., & Cook, C. D. (1977). Scales for the measurement of innovativeness. Human Communication Research, 4(1), 58–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1977.tb00597.x
• McCroskey, J. C. (1977). Oral communication apprehension: A summary of recent theory and research. Human Communication Research, 4(1), 78–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1977.tb00600.x
• Midgley, D. F., & Dowling, G. R. (1978). Innovativeness: The concept and its measurement. Journal of Consumer Research, 4(4), 229–242. https://doi.org/10.1086/208701
• Pallister, J. G., & Foxall, G. R. (1998). Psychometric properties of the Hurt–Joseph–Cook scales for the measurement of innovativeness. Technovation, 18(11), 663–675. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4972(98)00073-7
• Rogers, E. M. (1962). Diffusion of innovations (1st ed.). Free Press of Glencoe.
• Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations (4th ed.). The Free Press.
• Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.
• Rogers, E. M., & Cartano, D. G. (1962). Methods of measuring opinion leadership. Public Opinion Quarterly, 26(3), 435–441. https://doi.org/10.1086/267118

Items of the Scale