Golias, Mihalis M.

Maritime transportation is a critical component of international trade with approximately 90% of the global trade volume carried by deep sea vessels (Journal of Commerce (JOC), 2014). The World Shipping Council (2014) indicates that “it would require hundreds of freight aircraft, many miles of rail cars, and fleets of trucks to carry the goods that can fit on one large liner ship”. According to the data provided by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, 2015), the overall international seaborne trade reached 9.8 billion tons in 2014 with a significant increase of containerized (5.6% in tonnage), dry (2.4% in tonnage), and major bulk cargo (6.5% in tonnage) from 2013. Similar growth is expected to continue. Most of the high-value cargo and general consumer goods are shipped in a containerized form. Liner shipping companies, looking for transport efficiency and economies of scale, have increased vessel size on most of the trade routes. The Journal of Commerce (JOC), 2015 highlights that CMA CGM placed an order for six vessels with 14,000 TEU capacity in the first half of 2015 after an earlier order for three 20,000 TEU vessels. Maersk has recently ordered eleven 19,500 TEU vessels, while MOL and OOCL placed orders for vessels with 20,000 TEU capacity. Note that the number of megaships is projected to increase by at least 13% by 2020 (Journal of Commerce (JOC), 2015).

Over the last few years, a rapid explosion of new technologies has created opportunities to address critical freight transportation challenges in urban, suburban, and rural areas. These innovations include truck platooning, smart parking systems, collaborative and shared logistics techniques, and connected autonomous vehicles. These new technologies are influencing consumer behavior and reshaping freight supply chain management at the urban, regional, and international level. In order to understand how these innovations are changing the field of freight transportation, it is essential to understand how organizations choose to adopt innovations. Adoption methods available from consumer behavior research are mostly based on individuals, and there is limited material on the behavior of organizations in regards to innovation adoption. The general adoption methods cannot be directly used in modeling adoption of innovations by organizations without further study and modifications.
Approaches to innovation adoption can be broken into two sections: theoretical and methodological approaches. The theoretical approaches attempt to identify the forces that cause an organization to accept or reject an innovation. Once the forces have been identified, the theoretical approaches explain how the forces interact and influence the adoption process. Methodological approaches are composed of modeling techniques which can be applied to innovations in order to generate predictions of adoption patterns. By identifying the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, it is possible to select the most appropriate theoretical and methodological approach for organizational adoption.