An Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Legitimation Strategies And Innovation Performance

Since Schumpete(r1934)proposed the innovation theory, innovation activities have been carried out vigorously all over the world. China even regards indigenous innovation as an economic development policy, promoting the way from made-in-China to innovated-in-China. And how to improve the success of innovation has become an increasingly hot topic. As the innovation carrier, enterprises are often confused by such problems as good technology with no markets or good innovation model with no profits. Institutional theory suggests that whether a new economic activity could be widely accepted and recognized, not only depends on the efficiency selection of social groups but also the institutional environment like norms, culture and conventions, namely the innovation legitimacy. As early as 1934 Schumpeter has put forward questions about how to overcome oppositions and win customers to eventually create profit through innovations. Thus, this paper aims to explore ways to improve the innovation success through the study of innovation legitimation from the perspective of institutional embeddedness of innovation.Institutional theory suggests that the organization legitimacy determines the degree of understanding, evaluation and acceptance of an innovative activity by social groups. Resource based theory argues that organizations with legitimacy can obtain development resources from external stakeholders, and legitimacy is considered to be the resource that can bring key resources. Contingency theory suggests that a strategic process could be affected by internal and external situation of the organization, positively or negatively. Based on the above theories, the paper aims to answer the following three key questions: 1) the relationship between legitimation strategy and innovation performance; and whether their impacts on innovation performance are the same; 2) the relationship between organizational slack and innovation performance; and the organizational slack’s moderating role in legitimation strategy and innovation performance relationship; 3) external environment’s moderating role in the relationship between legitimation strategy and innovation performance; and whether their moderating effects are the same.On the basis of above discussions and related theoretical literature, this paper first selects the five typical enterprises from different industry case studies,and constructs a conceptual model proposes 13 hypotheses divided into 5 groups. Then by use of factor analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis based on 212 enterprises’data, it tests the hypotheses and further discusses the results. Finally, this paper illustrates its findings’ theoretical contributions and management implications, points out the limitations and gives advice on further study.After such exploring and testing processes, main conclusions are reached:1. Legitimation strategy of conforming environment、select environment and manipulate environment, respectively, has a positive impact on innovation performance; and the impact of manipulate environment on innovation performance is the forward, followed by select environment, the impact of conforming environment is minimal.2. Organizational slack has a positive impact on innovation performance. That is the more, slack resources to improve innovation performance. Organizational slack has no significant moderating impact on the relationship between conforming strategy and innovation performance; and organizational slack has a positive moderating impact on the mechanism, through which select strategy influences innovation performance, and also through which manipulate strategy influences innovation performance.3. Environment dynamism has a positive moderating impact on the mechanism through which the three legitimation strategies respectively influence innovation performance. In other words, the positive relationship between the three legitimation strategies and innovation performance is stronger in a high dynamism environment than in a low dynamism environment. Environment munificence has a negative moderating impact, on the relationship between conforming strategy and innovation performance, and also on the relationship between select strategy and innovation performance. Then, environment munificence has no moderating impact on the relationship between manipulate strategy and innovation performance.Compared with other researches, the theoretical contribution of this study demonstrates on the following aspects:1. A comprehensive theoretical perspectives of resource-based theory, contingency theory and institutional theory to research innovation issues, at home and abroad is still a small number of relevant studies. Previous studies pay more attention on the efficiency or technology issues of innovation, and ignore the important role of institutional embeddedness on innovation success. Based on the perspective of institutional embeddedness of innovation, this paper investigates the impact of legitimation strategies on innovation performance, with a view to improve the success rate of innovation and provide new and useful ways to the management of inspiration.2. The empirical research on the legitimation strategies and innovation performance, enriched legitimacy theory and research methods. Legitimacy study is still in its infancy, and the more existing literature are theoretical discussion and case studies, then research methods relatively simple, but the empirical testing is an important tool for the development and the formation of a unified theory. Based on the date from 212 Chinese enterprises, this empirical testing results and conclusions promote the development of legitimacy theory a step forward.3. Organizational slack is introduced in this research model, and verified a positive impact on innovation performance, as well as play a significantly moderating role in the model. These prove that, slack resources is not without resources, but idle, undervalued, do not get full use of resources. Enterprises can achieve the value of slack resources by "the creative use of limited resources", to promote the smooth implementation of the legitimation strategies and improve innovation performance. Meanwhile, the environment of dynamism and munificence, as the two contingency variables, not only provide different research conclusions, but also provide a meaningful reference for academia and practice areas.