Briefing Paper

Adoption of Innovations and Productivity of Enterprises in French-Speaking sub-Saharan Africa: Case of Cameroon, Senegal and Ivory Coast

The productivity of firms is the result of many factors, including their ability to innovate. For most authors, innovation can be diversified into product, process, organization, and marketing innovation. The objective of this work is to highlight the impact of the adoption of innovations on firms’ productivity in Cameroon, Senegal, and Ivory Coast. This work is based on the survey “Determinants of firms’ performance in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa: The case of Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Senegal conducted among 1,897 companies (639 in Cameroon, 723 in Senegal and 535 in Ivory Coast) in 2014 by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). This work uses a methodology consisting of two blocks of equations with a repeating structure. By estimating these equations using the bivariate probit and Double Least Squares (DLS) methods, the study finds that technological and non-technological innovation are complementary and have important effects on productivity of firms. This complementarity is proof that technological innovation contributes better to productivity when it is accompanied by non-technological innovation and vice versa. However, the introduction of new products (or services) accompanied by new methods of organization and marketing have a greater effect on the productivity of enterprises.