The Impact Of Legitimacy On Business Model Innovation

In order to reason the success of business model innovation from the perspective of legitimacy,the exploratory double-case study method is applied to analyze two classic car-hailing firms.Taking Uber and Didi as the cases,this paper studies the impact of legitimacy on business model innovation.The findings are: In the case of lacking regulative legitimacy,the result of business model innovation depends on the social legitimacy.After the establishment of regulative legitimacy,whether the business model innovation will succeed or not depends on its regulative legitimacy.The regulative legitimacy is on the basis of the social legitimacy,among which the legitimacy of institution plays a decisive role.Furthermore,the legitimacy of consumer and private cars play a fundamental and complementary role respectively.The main contributions of this paper lie in studying the acquisition and evolution mechanism of legitimacy in the process of designing new business model.It reveals the reason that how can firms achieve the success of business model innovation through building up regulative legitimacy and social legitimacy,which has theoretical and practical significance for Chinese firms.