Innovation and imitation effects in the mobile telecommunication service market

This study investigates adoption patterns of the first mover and the followers in the Information and Communication Technology industry. The continuous behavior of adopters over time is difficult to analyze and most previous studies were cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. In order to overcome these limitations, a mathematical diffusion model with verified official time-series data is used to analytically investigate the impact of both innovation and imitation effects on the mobile phone adoption in South Korea. The results showed that the imitation effect of the first mover was larger than those of the followers in the mature mobile telecommunication services market in South Korea. The innovation effect of the follower was larger than that of the first mover, and the innovation effect was larger than the imitation effect in the market.