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Purpose– The current knowledge concerning how organizations adopt innovations is considerably less than the sum of its parts. The aim of this paper is to review the innovation adoption and diffusion approach and connect it with the main related theoretical fields within business-to-business marketing.Design/methodology/approach– The paper provides a conceptual discussion, the aim being to develop an integrative conceptual framework.Findings– The adoption and diffusion approach gives little indication of the effects on adoption of the established relationships and the wider relational setting comprising the direct and indirect influences between the network actors. It is rather the innovation and the related communication that are in focus. As a result, the innovation and its adoption and diffusion are considered unique phenomena, the actors are assigned the static roles of opinion leaders and change agents, social system can be defined, and there is no competition. The current theoretical approaches within the business-to-business marketing could provide support in building a more realistic view of adoption and diffusion in industrial context.Originality/value– The contribution of the proposed conceptual model lies in its capacity to take into account organizational behavior in the form of individual-level actions that underpin the adoption process and relate this intra-firm behavior to its wider network context, thereby facilitating the production of a system-level account and a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of adoption.

Purpose
– The aim of this paper is to provide understanding on how the buyer can mobilize experience-based information scattered around the business network, by means of customer references, word-of-mouth and reputation, and how this facilitates the buying process.


Design/methodology/approach
– The qualitative study scrutinizes eight cases comprising buyers of knowledge intensive services and technology innovations. The paper draws on the literature on buying and purchasing, customer references, word-of-mouth and reputational information.


Findings
– The findings identify the different roles of references, word-of-mouth, collegial advice networks, and reputation, and suggest that experience-based information provides information on offerings, suppliers and the problem solving situation in complex buying per se.


Research limitations/implications
– The article's contribution is to provide a framework depicting the employment of experience-based information in complex buying, which ensues through focal and continuous buying processes. Insights from this research are broadly applicable to the contexts of knowledge intensive, innovation and solutions business. Further qualitative research should aim to form constructs and define their interrelations to be tested in subsequent quantitative research.


Originality/value
– This study generates new understanding on how buyers gather and use experience-based information to solve complex problems in buying. It contributes by merging references, word-of-mouth, collegial social networks, and reputation as sources of experience-based information, identifying information embedded in those means, and exploring how the information and means are used throughout the complex buying situation.