The Illegitimacy of Successful Product Innovation in Established Firms

This paper reports on a theory building effort to understand the persistent difficulties with successful product innovation in large, established firms. Drawing on an institutional approach, we suggest that the constituent activities of effective product innovation either violate established practice or fall into a vacuum where no shared understandings exist to make them meaningful. Product innovation, therefore, is illegitimate. This means that to enhance their innovative abilities, managers must weave the activities of product innovation into their institutionalized system of thought and action, not merely change structures or add values. We use insights from 134 innovators to identify the different ways that product innovation is illegitimate, and to consider alternate ways to overcome these problems. Exploratory results suggest that successful product innovators experience as many instances of illegitimacy as others, but creatively reframed their activities more often to legitimate their work. We conclude with some new insights for why barriers to innovation exist in large, established firms, and how those barriers can be managed.