The phrase "initially driven by" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe the initial motivation or cause for something. For example: "The project was initially driven by a desire to reduce the number of homeless people in the community."
"The committee accepts that, as the government response suggests, UK policy in Libya was initially driven by a desire to protect civilians.
While this was initially driven by the seasonal story, the performance since the start of the year has been driven by better volumes than the bears had feared.
Although it was initially driven by food, the rise in prices is now broad, and, as the RBI called it in today's statement, "stubborn".
The backlash against this image is understandable given that popular opinion of Zelda was initially driven by Ernest Hemingway's notoriously caustic descriptions in A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, in which he dismissed her as insane and blamed Scott's growing dependence on drink on his wife.
"While the deal was initially driven by Vodafone's desire to gain control of the critical Italian and German mobile markets, the bid ended up focusing more on the ability to gain critical scale and scope to exploit wireless data and Internet opportunities and offer seamless pan-European-global data services to the mobile market," said Christian Kern, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney.
But having visited both in recent weeks, I can tell you that they have one very big thing in common: the political eruptions in both countries were not initially driven by any particular ideology but rather by the most human of emotions — the quest for dignity and justice.
Influenced by the effects of a devalued ruble following the 1998 financial crisis, the recovery was initially driven organically by growth of domestic firms who benefited from import substitution.
While initially driven out of the towns by the government's military operation, opposition fighters returned as soon as government forces moved on to the next town, returning the situation, we were told, to pretty much what it was before the attacks.
This suggests that the nature of the drug-resistant HIV epidemic could change considerably, initially being driven by acquired resistance and then evolve to be dominated by cases who have transmitted (but hidden) drug resistance.
Most pertinently, domestication has been posited to initially be driven by selection for tameness.
Product quality must be exceptional, since the company's reputation will initially be driven by the experiences of users as well as word of mouth advertising.
