Institutional Effects on E-payment Entrepreneurship in a Developing Country: Enablers and Constraints

The purpose of this study is to understand how regulative, normative and cognitive institutions affect e-payment entrepreneurship in developing countries. Lack of e-payment technologies has been identified as a key constraint to e-commerce adoption and diffusion in the developing world. The availability of e-payment technologies in the developed world provides opportunities for their transfer to and adaptation in the developing world. However, research on attempts by governments or e-business entrepreneurs to provide e-payment innovations in the developing world and possible institutional effects on such initiatives remain limited. Drawing on interpretive case study methodology and the new institutional theory as a lens, this study traces an e-payment entrepreneurship attempt in the developing-country context of Ghana. The findings show that some national and international institutions encouraged the initiative. However, unclear regulations and bureaucratic processes of the Central Bank as well as the entrepreneur's own cognitive failure to consider contextual differences between the developed and the developing world constrained the initiative. The study advises developing-country e-business entrepreneurs to understand their local institutional environment and not assume that imported technologies will work the same way as in the developed world. It also calls on developing-country governments to promote clear regulations and streamline certification processes to encourage technological innovations such as e-payment.