An Investigation of Leapfrogging and Web 2.0 Implementation

This paper investigates the leapfrog phenomenon, particularly late adopters of the Internet bypassing early Internet adopters in the implementation of Web 2.0 in tourism. Even though the Diffusion of Innovation theory covers many aspects of innovation adoption and implementation, implementation stage research remains sparse and perhaps no research has investigated the leapfrog phenomenon across different adopter categories. Thus, this study used a software robot to generate reports on Web 2.0 and User Active Features (UAF) by Swiss tourism websites. Moreover, this study used the Wayback Machine to classify website adopter categories and then investigate the leapfrogging phenomenon across adopter categories. The results suggest a link between adopter categories and the odds of implementation of at least one UAF or Web 2.0 feature. However, the findings only showed a slight leapfrogging phenomenon between Laggards and the Late Majority in the UAF model. This research helps fill the gap on implementation stage research by the analysis of Web 2.0 features implemented in tourism.

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