A foresight study on university youth images of future & technology acceptance: The case of nanotechnology in food industry

The study examines the existing literature for the technology acceptance process in all areas, analyzes the shortcomings of the previous research, determines some of the success factors and integrates them with the existing literature for technology acceptance in the food domain. Moreover, this study enlightens the concepts of social trust, affect, benefit, risk and their effects on the willingness to buy decisions of the nanotechnological applications in the food sector.The findings suggested that gender and degree of expertise on nanotechnology do not have significant effect on social trust, affect, benefit, risk and their effects on the willingness to buy. The results of the repeated measurement analysis of variance illustrated that the respondents have same level of affect and benefit as far as the four nanotechnological applications which are nanotechnology used bread, tomatoes, juice and food packaging, are concerned. However, the application for tomatoes has been viewed as the most risky application. The group differences according to main sector of activity has suggested us that, affect evoked in food packaging has been viewed significantly different. The respondents grouped according to the self reported nanotechnology expertise also differed in their views for trust in food industry firms. The path analysis of the research model has explained the willingness to buy decisions of the Turkish youth and young adults of nanotechnological applications in food domain with a fair level of explained variance (R2 = 0.50). The comparisons of the research models results with the Swiss study also help us to distinguish the cultural and the institutional differences, that has to be taken into consideration in presentation of products with emerging technologies to the market.The present study also explored the expected development of nanotechnology through the scenarios that have illuminated the future expectations and thoughts. In this respect, the context of 2009 and 2029 have been explained with some parameters determined by the previous studies in the literature. The possible development paths of nanotechnology has been identified using this information. The results showed that; all of the different contexts determined by the cluster analysis, converged to a final setting. This era can be characterized as;high development potential, neutral public awareness, almost evenly distributed consumer?s demand with the lead of environmentally friendly products, more laws and regulations, high profit potential and public investments and a medium risk assessment by the public as far as the nanotechnology and its various applications are concerned.