The impact of information technology culture and personal innovativeness in information technology on digital entrepreneurship success

Purpose: Very little or no study has explored the predictors of behaviour and traits that determine digital entrepreneurship (DE) success. In response, the purpose of this paper is to present a research model that takes information technology (IT) culture as a theoretical lens and personal innovativeness and experience in IT projects as theoretical constructs to predict behaviour and traits that explain DE success.

Design/methodology/approach: Based on the literature review, the authors propose hypotheses and a research model. The authors tested the model using structural equation modelling (SEM), by surveying a sample of digital entrepreneurs operating in the Yabacon Valley, Lagos, Nigeria.

Findings: The results indicate that IT culture is an essential predictor of achieving DE success. The results also suggest that an entrepreneur's innovativeness in IT and experience in IT projects have significant negative and positive moderating effects on the relationship between IT culture and achieving DE success.

Research limitations/implications: This paper taps into a new setting – DE context – by exploring the moderation effects of an entrepreneur's innovativeness in IT and experience in IT projects on the link between their IT culture and achieving a successful DE outcome.

Practical implications: This model offers managers an understanding of how IT culture and personal innovativeness and experience in IT work together to achieve DE success. Meanwhile, it sheds some light on managers to treat individuals with different levels of experience differently.

Originality/value: The authors theorise IT culture, personal innovativeness and experience in IT and show their effects on DE success, thus making an essential contribution to the information systems (ISs) and entrepreneurship research and practice. Moreover, the authors provide a novel methodology to conceptualise IT culture as a second-order hierarchical reflective construct by giving evidence that partial least squares (PLS) path modelling can assess a hierarchical model with moderating effects. This study answers scholars' call to construct more accurate explanations of innovation outcomes in an increasingly digital world.