ABSTRACT
SUMMARY Organizations increasingly adopt and implement telematic innovations. This process proceeds through several stages, although often in a non-linear way: R&D, diffusion, adoption, implementation and incorporation. Managing these stages successfully requires not only an innovation orientation but also capacities to adapt the organization and its members to the innovation. From the literature on telematic innovations and determinants of successful introduction it is however not clear which conditions are relevant in which cases. It appears that one has to distinguish several types of innovation, types of organizational setting, innovation phases and success criteria. By confronting the general theories on adoption and implementation of innovations with case evidence concerning telematic systems and services, characteristics and conditions specific for this kind of innovations are identified. Particularly important for telematics is its network aspect, i.e. introduction often implies interaction and increased interdependency of a cluster of organizations. An important question for the future is how to organize networks of organizations so that an adequate strategy can be developed for the assessment, design and adoption of telematic systems.
