Strategic and institutional approaches to product innovation: peripheral product innovation and the challenge of organisational legitimacy

Adopting an institutional perspective, this research examines the mechanisms through which marginal actors gain acceptance for product innovations in established organisations. We find that the strategic matching emphasised in most NPD research is complemented by efforts to align the innovation with the normative evaluations of what is “the right thing to do” and cognitive assumptions of what is “taken for granted” within the organisational environment. Three legitimating mechanisms are found to be used simultaneously during product development: lobbying to gain pragmatic legitimacy, internal relational building to gain cognitive legitimacy, and external relational building and obtaining feedback to gain moral legitimacy.