Summary in English Networking for Legitimacy: a Study of Entrepreneurial Networking and New Venture Legitimation in Dutch Healthcare

To market new products and services successfully, innovative ventures not only require good ideas but also organizational legitimacy. Legitimacy or ‘social acceptance’ from stakeholders allows entrepreneurs in the mobilizing of resources and necessary supportive contacts to grow their venture. Developing legitimacy is a particularly complex process for private ventures operating in markets of social goods. Historically established institutions and high levels of regulations characterize markets of social goods such as healthcare, education and energy. In the Netherlands, however, these markets are increasingly opened up to competition. Existing literature calls for a refinement of the sources and origins of both the process of entrepreneurial networking and organizational legitimacy development. Therefore, in this dissertation I examine processes of new venture legitimation by studying the social networking practices of entrepreneurs in the empirical setting of the Dutch healthcare sector. The main research question of this dissertation is therefore ’To what extent do variations between, and, within, entrepreneurial social networking and stakeholder engagement explain the degree and character of variations in new venture legitimation in Dutch healthcare?’ This study follows a mixed‐method research design to gain insight into this compound process. This dissertation consists of two opening chapters (1‐2) four empirical studies (3‐6) and a concluding chapter (7).