Success factors of IT innovation projects in Central Asia: A study of IT innovation development in Uzbekistan.

Interaction of dynamic ecosystems comprising of government, academia, research institutes and increasingly educated populations are turning developing countries into hot beds for innovations. IT innovation is known to significantly to elevate a country’s growth and to enhance productivity. Firms across the world want to set their foot in developing regions for profits and inclusion of masses through a plethora of innovative services and products that could be developed in today’s opportune times by the information technologies. Riding on the wave of digital revolution and increasing accessibility, with 75 million mobile subscriptions in Central Asia and about 37 million Internet users (in 2019-2020), which are continuously growing, local firms are introducing innovative services, products and applications for the mass inclusion of the under served in various economic sectors. Innovative products, services and business models are developed either indigenous in Central Asian nations or developed jointly by developers from developed nations and implemented in Central Asian countries. There are successful innovations that provide pioneering services to under served areas and are emulated in developing economies with slight content and technology alterations, there are innovations that meet failures due to sustainability and interoperability issues or policy bottlenecks related to country specific regulations in Central Asia. There are several reasons for the failure of an IT innovation. Regional adoption and scalability of the innovative services and products are issues innovators should think about for the success of deployed projects. It is now well-acknowledged that emerging economies, like in Uzbekistan, are beginning to innovate at a rapid rate despite some of the challenges they face. It is important to understand how these economies innovate, what factors affect innovation in such nations, and what are the impacts. I believe that the absence of studies is primarily due to a lack of understanding of what has been found with respect to IT innovation in Uzbekistan economy, what needs to be studied, and how they should be studied. However, to the best of my knowledge, little research till date has been conducted on this topic. This research is based on business-level data from 131 Uzbekistan companies collected through a survey. The data gathered identified ten critical success factors affecting IT innovation, adoption and diffusion in Uzbekistan. The results show that in the country factors of success IT innovation are mostly similar with global study. Despite legal institutions fell behind IT development in the country, government, giving legal reliefs for new technologies, tries to support at the beginning. I believe my study makes an important contribution to research on IT innovation in emerging economies, and can be useful resource for future researchers interested in this topic.