**1. Introduction**

China now has the most car ownership in the world due to its rapid economic development. As of the end of November 2022, there were 415 million motor vehicles in China overall, of which 318 million were automobiles, according to the most recent statistics provided by the Ministry of Public Security of China. More than 500 million people drive automobiles, including 463 million car owners [1]. The number of cars and drivers in China currently leads the world. However, child safety seats are not used nearly enough in China. According to the Blue Book of China Children's Road Traffic Safety (2018) [2], the death rate of children traveling in vehicles without child safety seats is eight times greater than that of children traveling in vehicles with child safety seats installed. Less than 10% of children in China use child safety seats, much lower than the nearly 90% penetration rate in Europe and the US. Sixty percent of traffic fatalities among children aged 1 to 14 occurred in the ten years from 2012 to 2021 among children under six. Such information was made public by Gao Yan, director of the Traffic Safety Technology Department of the Traffic Management Science Institute of the Ministry of Public Security [3]. Children who died in cars made up a more significant percentage of child traffic injury deaths, accounting for an average of 43.9% over the past ten years. An amount of 2954 kids between the ages of 1 and 15 lost their lives in traffic accidents, and 13,938 others were hurt, according to the China Road

**Citation:** Jiang, L.; Zhao, M.; Lin, H.; Yang, L. How Do Consumer Innovation Characteristics and Consumption Value Shape Users' Willingness to Buy Innovative Car Safety Seats? *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 172. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010172

Academic Editors: José-María Montero, María del Carmen Valls Martínez and Pedro Antonio Martín Cervantes

Received: 20 October 2022 Revised: 16 December 2022 Accepted: 19 December 2022 Published: 22 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Traffic Accident Statistics Annual Report (2017) [4]. It is critical to increase the use of child safety seats as a result.

There have been efforts made in every sphere of society to increase the use of child safety seats. For instance, some researchers have studied the data on child safety seats manufactured and exported from China [5]. In contrast, some designers have conducted research to enhance the functionality of child safety seats [6–8]. Some doctors have also studied the situation of newborn children using child safety seats [9–11]. Studies have also urged the government and law enforcement agencies to make laws and regulations more stringent [12–14]. The analysis of the deciding factors in purchasing child safety seats needs to be improved from the consumer's perspective.

The theory of consumption value (TCV) is a marketing theory that provides insights into the motivations of consumers' consumption behavior through consumption value [15]. Customers prefer to purchase goods that are perceived to have the highest value [16]. The theory of consumer value (TCV), developed by Sheth et al., provides a substantial theoretical and practical contribution by illuminating the rationale behind consumers' decisions to purchase specific products, product categories, and brands based on their perceived value [17]. TCV offers the chance to enlighten and enrich the knowledge of how a variety of goods and services are consumed, including food [18,19], clothing [20], health [21], education [22], travel [23], etc. This claim is supported by recent research, which shows that, in order to comprehend consumer behavior in the modern online and offline environments, perceived value tends to present consumption value [24,25]. TCV has made significant contributions to the theory and practice of motivating consumer behavior. There are no studies on the connection between consumer value and consumer behavior in the context of intelligent safety seats. This study's goals are to integrate and synthesize the knowledge based on TCV's research findings in the intelligent products field, conduct a more profound analysis of smart child safety seats, and make recommendations for future consumer studies.

China leads the world in producing child safety seats, turning out more than 15 million units annually. To meet consumer demand and increase the use of child safety seats by aligning with consumer values. Chinese manufacturers have developed a variety of "innovative" and functional product designs: the intelligent safety seat. Dehumidification and safety monitoring systems integrated into innovative safety seats are examples [26,27]. In addition, child safety seats that can adjust to a child's size automatically [28] and detect and alarm when a child has been left in a vehicle [29] are now commercially available. At the moment, there are no research studies on intelligent child safety seats, which are an innovative intelligent product in a particular field.

The adoption of new products by consumers has been extensively studied in the past, and several conventional research models have been put forth. For instance, TAM (the technology adoption model) [30], TAM2 (the enhanced technology acceptance model) [31], TPB (the planned behavior theory) [32], TRA (the rational action theory) [33], UTAUT (the unified theory of technology acceptance and use [34], and DSI (the domain-specific innovativeness) have been developed [35].

TAM, TAM2, TRA, TPB, and UTAUT typically study new science and technology. Researchers are more likely to use the DSI theory for research on innovative products in various fields and attempt to explain its utility to consumer research [36,37].

DSI has been found to be the most practical scale for assessing consumers' capacity for innovation in particular product categories in empirical studies conducted across the globe, including those conducted in the United States, Germany, and France [37–39].

The DSI structure has been found to positively influence consumers' willingness to try new products in earlier studies with related properties, though the influence coefficient is very small [38,39]. Because of this, some researchers have reformulated and put to the test the DSI structure, as well as its relationship to the characteristics of innovative products, and have investigated how these attributes affect consumers' intentions to buy new products [40,41].

Since there is no similar research in the intelligent child safety seat industry, we refer to Jeong, S. C. et al. [40,41]. We modified the research model to be more suitable for consumers of intelligent child safety seats.

Prior academic work has yet to, to our knowledge, successfully integrate domainspecific innovation theories into the theoretical structure of consumer value. This study aims to fill knowledge gaps by examining the relationship between innovation indicators in these areas and how consumers perceive the value of smart safety seats and whether they plan to purchase them.

The contributions of this study are as follows:


This paper's remaining sections are organized as follows. The first section introduces the theoretical foundation of this study. The second section discusses the study's methodology, followed by the third section's study results. The fourth section provides suggestions for future research directions. The fifth section introduces the study's limitations and conclusions.

#### **2. Theoretical Background and Hypothesis Development**
