The direct and indirect effects of economic wealth on time to take-off

Our objective is to decompose the influence of the economic wealth on the time to sales take-off into a direct effect and an indirect effect through time to introduction. We use a traditional regression based and an advanced counterfactual framework for our analysis, based on adoption data for four generations of mobile phone from 172 countries. Our study extends the sales take-off literature by better understanding how the commercialization stage (time to introduction) affects the confirmation stage (time to sales take-off) in innovation diffusion while controlling for local market structure, socio-economic, demographic and cultural variables suggested in the literature. We show that economic wealth exerts: a positive direct effect by shortening sales take-off time; a negative indirect effect by shortening time to introduction which tends to extend time to sales take-off. The uncovering of this relationship is achieved by treating time to introduction as a mediating variable, departing from previous studies where it is treated as an exogeneous variable. We further show that the negative indirect effect is diluted in the case of high income countries but not in the case of upper middle-income countries. A sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of our findings. Our findings will help firms develop optimal market entry strategies considering the resources available.