Abstract
Country-level institutional conditions are known to play key roles in firms' innovation and operations. While it is acknowledged that an unfavourable institutional context negatively influences innovation, less is known about which firms are most affected by these institutional conditions. This research aims to examine which institutional conditions affect firms' product innovation and which firms can innovate their products despite the unfavourable institutional environment. The empirical results based on 21,056 firms from 42 African countries show that legal institutions and informal competition positively influence product innovation while perceived policy instability has a negative influence. The results proved that the interactions between perceived policy instability and favourable legal institutions negatively influence product innovation. However, the joint effects of these institutional conditions positively impact product innovation. Private domestic ownership positively moderates the relationship between a favourable legal environment and product innovations, while foreign ownership negatively moderates the relationship between a favourable legal environment and product innovations. Finally, the results showed that both domestic and foreign ownerships negatively moderate the relationship between perceived policy instability and product innovation. The main practical implication from our result is that policy practitioners in African countries should endeavour to reduce the potential negative impact of the policy instability and unfavourable legal environment for foreign-owned firms as it reduces their incentives to innovate.