Incorporating virtual reality innovation in higher education services: A possibility for technology adoption

Technological innovation plays a significant role in advancing new service features that can serve individual users’ needs; thus, it can attract user intention to adopt or use the service offerings of the firms, and incorporating virtual reality (VR) innovation into higher education services also merits this closer attention. This research proposes an Innovative Formulation Framework for Technology Adoption, aiming to examine associations between Innovative Formulation (technological innovation), Tech-benefit Creation (ease of use and perceived usefulness), System Reliability (trust), and Decision-making in VR Adoption (adoption intention). 550 university students from different universities of Kazakhstan were invited to join this research via questionnaires, providing researchers with 521 valid data to be analyzed in a Structural Equation Model. Findings highlighted that technological innovation significantly influenced both ease of use and perceived usefulness, while ease of use further influenced perceived usefulness. Next, ease of use and perceived usefulness significantly influenced student trust and intention to adopt VR. Finally, student trust significantly influenced intention to adopt VR. Despite completing the overall research objective, this research still had some limitations, such as having a limited number of factors, containing no comparison of VR adoption between students from different higher education levels, and concentrating on VR adoption in higher education only. These limitations give more clues to future studies to advance new findings and conclusions for more knowledge that contributes to existing literature.