دانلود رایگان مقاله نوآوری اجتماعی پذیرش فناوری کارآفرینان

abstract

Technology adoption by the marginalized community is indeed an important issue in global poverty reduction. To realize it, this paper contributes by doing an empirical test of the technology acceptance model, amongst those users typically always deprived in the existing social structure. Firstly, the study aims to examine the influence of Technology Readiness Index (TRI) 2.0′s four indicators (optimism, innovativeness, discomfort and insecurity) on bKash entrepreneurs' perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) of bKash technology. Secondly, it aims to investigate the effect of ‘bKash’ entrepreneurs' PEOU and PU on their wellbeing. A total of 360 usable data were collected from the bKash agents in Bangladesh. We employed SEMPLS3.0 for data analysis. The results indicate that optimism and innovativeness strongly drive perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Subjective well-being was found to be strongly predicted by perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. The study indicates that poor people are somewhat ready to use and accept technology that leads to a sense of well-being. Bringing together the concept of subjective well-being with TRI and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is this paper's contribution to the knowledge domain.

7. Discussion

From a holistic view, our society has both privileged and marginalized groups of people. The privileged have easy access to knowledge, technology, and other economic activities, whereas, in most of the cases the marginalized are deprived from the same. We can term them as deprives group as well. Bearing this in mind, two core questions have been addressed in this study. The first question sought to know whether the micro-entrepreneurs of the marginalized group are able to use the technology of mobile money services. The second pertained to whether there is any change of their social condition as a result of using such technology. The demographic data of respondents indicates that the average income of micro-entrepreneurs have increased by 27% on an average. This means that after being agents of bKash mobile money services, these micro-entrepreneurs were able to generate an additional USD168 per month on an average. Even though we cannot conclude, only based on this data, that they have made positive changes in their life, it can be presumed that being Bkash agents helped widen their scope of income generation. Perhaps, this result would support the main findings of this study.