Research On The Impact Of Business Model Innovation And Legitimacy On New Social Enterprise Performance

At present,the complex social problems urgently needed to be resolved in developing countries determine China’s urgent needs and development trends in social entrepreneurship research.Since the germination of social enterprises in China in the early 21 st century,social enterprises have been developing continuou sly for more than ten years and have made important contributions in poverty alleviation,employment promotion,environmental protection and other fields.In addition to newly created social enterprises,more and more non-profit organizations and traditional enterprises under the background of China have transformed into social enterprises through the innovation of existing business models.However,as a newly emerging thing,its innovative form of double value creation subverts the public’s cognition that social value and economic value cannot coexist,and hinders the public’s understanding and trust.Social enterprises often face the "legitimacy paradox",and the logical conflict between social mission and market value also brings challenges to the performance of social enterprises.There is a lack of empirical research on business model innovation and legitimacy of social enterprise s.To clarify the internal mechanism of promoting the performance of social enterprises is of certain significance to improve the success rate of social entrepreneurship and enhance the explanatory power of previous theoretical studies.On the basis of relevant theories,the paper outlines the business model innovation theory,legitimacy theory and life cycle theory.Based on bus iness model innovation and social enterprise performance,this study focuses on different development stages of social enterprises,and studies how business model innovation can improve social enterprise performance from the perspective of legitimacy,whic h is widely concerned but rarely studied by social enterprises.This paper combines hierarchical regression analysis and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis(fs QCA)to clarify two antecedents of social enterprise performance and propose a more inclusive framework that addresses the factor of dynamic development stages.The questionnaire design was completed with reference to the existing mature scales,and 183 valid data were obtained in China through the questionnaire survey.The data was processed using SPSS 20.0,AMOS 21.0 and fs QCA 3.0 softwares.By using factor analysis,correlation analysis,regression analysis,fs QCA and other methods,it was found that: business model innovation has a positive effect on new social enterprise performance and legitimacy acts as the partial mediator between them;new venture development stage has moderating effects on the relationship between legitimacy and new social enterprise performance as well as the indirect effect caused by business model innovation to new social enterprise performance through legitimacy.Further,the analysis of fs QCA explores the necessary and sufficient conditions for the growth of new social enterprise performance in different stages,and reveals five configurations(referred as C1,C2 a,C3a,C3 b,C4)that enhancing new social enterprise performance.Based on the conclusions above,this paper reveals the mechanism of business model innovation and legitimacy on the performance of new social enterprises,enriching the theoretical models of social enterprise performance and social entrepreneurship theory research methods.Finally,this paper provides management suggestions for social enterprise entrepreneurs in terms of business model innovation,legitimacy,and the development stage of new v entures,in order to effectively guide the specific practice of the growth of new social enterprises in China.