Designing an Innovative Services Acceptance Model: A New Approach in Health Marketing

This research aimed at designing a model for the acceptance of innovation-based services of umbilical cord blood banks as a new approach in health marketing. It is an exploratory qualitative research based on the grounded theory and heuristic analysis. The research data were obtained through interview with a sample of 18 marketing professors and 20 customers of the Royan Institute Umbilical Cord Blood Bank who were selected based on theoretical saturation. The gleaned data were analyzed through open, axial and selective coding. To enhance research validity, the process of data coding was carried out under the supervision of 3 service marketing experts whose suggestions were applied. Moreover, the inter-rater reliability of the coding process and concept-mining was checked by asking another marketing expert to code the data whose findings revealed acceptable levels of reliability. Further, the importance of dimensions, entities and indexes of the model in each group was determined via Delphi method under the supervision of professors. The findings revealed a hierarchical conceptual model for acceptance of innovative services with 7 dimensions, including the quality of services, the characteristics of services, perception of acceptors, individual factors, innovation features, reference groups and sources of information, 22 entities and 93 indexes.