Consumer Uptake of Digital Low-Carbon Innovations

Digitalisation is transforming the consumer landscape. Digitally-enabled mobility, food provision, domestic living, and energy supply can help reduce carbon emissions. We use stated preference data from a nationally-representative sample in the UK (n=3014) to understand consumer adoption of 13 digital low-carbon innovations across mobility, food, homes and energy domains. Using diffusion of innovations as our analytical framework, we test three main adoption drivers: adopter characteristics, social influence, and innovation attributes. We use blocks of variables measuring each adoption driver as predictors in logit models that distinguish adopters from non-adopters. We focus our analysis on adoption drivers that are significant and consistent predictors of digital innovation adoption across different contexts.Compared to non-adopters, we find that early adopters of digital low-carbon innovations are more likely to be younger, in employment, living in multi-person households, digitally skilful, environmentally active, and technologically active. We also find that early adopters are more exposed to inter-personal information flows (i.e., social influence), use social media more intensively, and perceive the innovations to offer higher relative advantage over current practices, be easy to use, be more compatible both with their values and their lifestyles. These drivers of adoption hold across mobility, food, homes and energy-related innovations, so can be translated into generalisable strategies, policies, and interventions for stimulating consumer uptake of digital low-carbon innovations. Although our data collection specifically characterises adopters and non-adopters in the UK, the innovations in our sample are increasingly available in markets worldwide so our findings have broad applicability.