The diffusion of cellular phones: a model for Italy and a comparison with the United States

The last decade has been characterized by extraordinary changes in the telecommunications sector in Italy that has gradually experienced the passage from monopoly to market competition. Many factors had a crossover impact on the process: technological and product innovation, the increasing share of consumption, the fast-pace growth of the mobile market, and the globalisation of the economy. The effect of these innovations and their influence on the socio-economic environment are here analysed both in terms of introduction of new technologies and the consequent process of substitution. Actually, the word “innovation” should be intended with a more general meaning, not exclusively technological, but considering all those elements that make a product distinctive. Under this perspective, a product can be considered innovative even if it doesn’t contain technological innovations: the new use of an existing product can be considered innovative, since a feature that is new to a product can be considered innovative to that product. It is evident that this wider definition requires a more flexible approach to the analysis of the diffusion process. Moreover, this approach could increase interest on studying in what way people belonging to different socio-economic environments respond to an innovation and identifying those characteristics that enable their categorization. To this aim a deep insight in the telephone usage is here glanced by means of multi-logistic curves. The model explains growth phenomena constituted both from distinct growth and/or decline processes. Each distinct economic and technological process (introduction of a new technology, innovative services, lower rates, entry of a new competitor in the market etc.) can, therefore, be interpreted as a drive to the aggregate growth phenomenon (trend of telephone traffic, effects of market evolution, dynamics of technological innovation).