Organizational Ingenuity in Nascent Innovations: Gaining Resources and Legitimacy through Unconventional Actions:

How do innovators in large organizations acquire resources for their early-stage, untested, unproven innovations? Multiple established projects compete for scarce resources in large organizations. Innovators pursuing early-stage, untested innovations face considerable constraints in accessing scarce resources. Literature enumerates various sanctioned and unsanctioned methods by which innovators acquire resources, such as borrowing, begging, scavenging, amplifying, bootlegging, and finagling – defined as obtaining resources through deceitful or underhanded methods. However, few theories explain how innovators act unconventionally, elude constraints to acquire resources, and yet gain acceptance for their innovations. To address this question, this study uses field data from nine organizations based primarily in Silicon Valley. Successful innovators employ organizational ingenuity or creative solutions to gain resources in the face of constraints. They employ two types of ingenuity: material ingenuity, creat...