Government influence and institutional strategies on the diffusion of innovations in emerging economies

Abstract

In emerging economies, various public programs have been created to stimulate local fi rms to adopt innovations, with the ultimate goal of increasing rates of economic development. This paper provides a preliminary attempt to identify factors associated with institutional infl uences in the processes of innovation diffusion in those areas, and proposes some basic associations: between the governmental interventions and the phases of the process of innovation diffusion; between the actions of governments and the forces that stimulate the process; and between the public policies and the characteristics of the institutional environment generally found in emerging economies. The analysis integrates concepts from various fi elds in the social sciences to offer fi ve propositions, at different levels of analysis, describing various aspects of the potentially strong infl uence that national governments exert on the process through which innovations are diffused in the institutional environments of the areas known as emerging economies.