ABSTRACT
Innovating firms are faced with myriad challenges within their innovation network. The prevailing challenges rests on improving prediction mechanisms that hopefully will assure cost to benefit parity as well as improve on existing competitive advantages. We present an approach which looked at how firms learn to innovate within their innovation networks. We postulate that innovation is generated from a source; typically an academic or research institution, and has initial adopters based on identified direct investors. The adoption behaviour of early and later adopters we argue helps determine the adoption decision of other firms within the innovation network through their imitation linked adoption of the diffused innovation. Thus, a mathematical analysis was conducted and subsequently tested with data from an emerging economy in sub-Saharan West Africa. The results were presented with economic, firm sustainability and policy implications drawn. Our approach is promising, by virtue of its ability to closely determine realistic innovation adoption predictions within an innovation network.
