From Imitation to Innovation: The Role of Organizational Slack and Organizational Legitimacy

Imitative innovation is the primary strategy for many enterprises to catch up, but few of them succeeded. It is often confused that enterprises could not go beyond imitation to achieve innovation. This paper examines imitative innovation as a process, divides it into two stages, and analyzes the key resources for each stage: organizational slack and legitimacy. These two variables are the focus of academic research nowadays, and affect whether enterprises can successfully achieve innovation. Base on exploring the nature and the role of these two variables and combing the case of BYD Co., we further demonstrates the mechanism of these two for enterprise to achieve innovation, and finally make two implications for corporate managers.