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This paper explores South African manufacturing of medical devices, focusing on firms' acquisition of imported and domestic technologies through technology transfer and their related absorptive capacity. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach, this paper demonstrates that technology transfer does occur in the medical device industry in South Africa, and that the absorptive capacity displayed by firms in the industry is sufficient to facilitate technology transfer. The results of the analysis suggest that there is room for policymakers to create and promote sectoral coherence and to coordinate the various stakeholders for the industry to grow. This study contributes to the scarce literature on technology transfer in the medical device industry in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to review the theoretical and empirical perspectives of innovation-diffusion literature. The objective of this paper is to develop a heuristic framework by reviewing the existing studies for analyzing the diffusion of innovation and its outcome in different sectors. The formal theoretical and empirical literature on technology diffusion that emerged in the fifties with the epidemic approach has been followed by a voluminous literature spanning different disciplines. From the different strands of literature on analyzing the process of diffusion, the paper finds that there is considerable heterogeneity within theoretical approaches with respect to the process of diffusion. It seems that innovation and diffusion are a complex process that hinges inter alia upon the nature of innovation, adopters' characteristics, institutional context and that all these vary over the time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]