Ricerc@Sapienza

The IoT potential economic impact is expected to fluctuate between $3.9 and $11 trillion a year by 2025 (Manyika et al. 2015). Although the clear potential of IoT market, its growth doesn't reflect the expectations. In this moment, after a decade of growth, the consumer technology market is flat (Björnsjö, Lovati, Viglino, 2016). For this reason, we will analyze why consumers do not buy smart objects, considering also the consumers¿ individual traits. In other words, the aim of this research is to identify consumers¿ barriers to the adoption and consumption of smart objects in order to understand how to remove or reduce them, and so improving the purchase intention of these products. More in details, starting from a review of both the literature about consumers¿ barriers to innovation in general, that we could call non-topic specific, and the literature about consumers¿ barriers to smart objects, that we could call topic-specific, we will identify the relevant barriers to our analysis. Then, we will identify clusters of consumers on the basis of their individual traits in order to understand if there are some barriers that ¿cut cross¿ all clusters. Finally, we will investigate more deeply these barriers because discovering how to remove them will exponentially increase the consumers'purchase intention and, consequently, the firms' profits.