Changing with the Times: An Integrated View of Identity, Legitimacy, and New Venture Life Cycles

To acquire resources, new ventures need to be perceived as legitimate. For this to occur, a venture must meet the expectations of various audiences with differing norms, standards, and values as the venture evolves and grows. We investigate how the organizational identity of a technology venture must adapt to meet the expectations of critical resource providers at each stage of its organizational life cycle. In so doing, we provide a temporal perspective on the interactions among identity, organizational legitimacy, institutional environments, and entrepreneurial resource acquisition for technology ventures. The core assertion from this conceptual analysis is that entrepreneurial ventures confront multiple legitimacy thresholds as they evolve and grow. We identify and discuss three key insights related to entrepreneurs’ efforts to cross those thresholds at different organizational life cycle stages: institutional pluralism, venture-identity embeddedness, and legitimacy buffering.