Experimentation and the diffusion of technology in China: Using big data to explore Consumer Channel Choice

A key challenge for academic research on behavior in society is access to data of the required volume, variety and veracity. Such data is of quantifiable operational value to corporate data owners, however, unlocking its strategic value through inductive ‘Big Data’ analysis invites a company to give access to that data before the bounds on data value can be fully assessed. This requires high degrees of trust. In this paper we report results from a decade of infrastructure and trust building that has allowed exploration of technology diffusion in China, the world’s largest market for digital technologies. We innovate by including in our sample both early adoption and early rejection of a new technology to enable characterization of the first stage of the diffusion process: ‘Experiri’ – to try out. We explore this by examining consumer channel choice over a period of two years for over 1 million individual consumers and over 1000 products. Using a highly scalable data-mining tool we demonstrate that propensity to experiment with new channels is predictable and has a dependency on the demographics of the consumer. This offers the possibility of better management of new technology introduction and market development.