Legitimacy for innovation through interacted perception

Abstract

The paradox of innovation as the problem to be innovative while also gaining legitimacy is the underlying idea of this paper. How are innovative entrepreneurs and their ideas affected by the need to find the legitimacy of their audience to have customers? Through qualitative interviews, this paper discusses the importance and influence of legitimacy for innovative entrepreneurship. This paper investigates the importance of legitimacy processes for entrepreneurs and points out enhancing, as well as, impeding factors that legitimacy gathering process have on innovations. It finds understanding as the main source affecting legitimacy processes and shows the different strategies for entrepreneurs to gather legitimacy. Furthermore, the work provides insight about the context-specific elements of the legitimacy gathering processes, as well as, an illustration and differentiation of the audience as the second group involved in legitimacy processes. This paper provides a new framework that discusses legitimation processes as an interplay between the entrepreneur and individuals of the audience. This new framework is an attempt to solve the long-lasting debate concerning the locus of control in legitimacy processes between institutional and cultural entrepreneurial scholars, by placing the locus of control in between a circle of influence and a circle of understanding.