For this paper, five cases of new business development at Canon were studied and investigated to
shed light on the logic for legitimizing the mobilization of key resources in the new business development process, and it was found that in four cases the logic was that endorsements had been received from other well-known companies or organizations. This paper emphasizes that the decision-making entity itself can deliver a process for legitimizing resource mobilization for a new business by referencing and utilizing social and political status, mainly because of the high level of trust placed in assessments made by well-known external economic entities.
The analytical framework employed in this paper is Burgelman’s Process Model of Internal Corporate Venturing process model, and two areas are analyzed. These are championing, an important process activity in the aforementioned model, and legitimization as a project strategy. The objects of the survey were projects at Canon to develop new businesses, namely 3DCGs, rotary encoders, new types of semiconductor wafer, liquid-crystal color filters, and new types of speaker.
Of these, I presented detailed facts concerning four cases the logic of which had been endorsed, and used a total of 10 examples from these cases to empirically verify them. For the investigation, I compiled the results of the analysis, discussed why such logic exists, and presented this logical model.
