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.

This paper explores the concept of loosely coupled systems as an Image representing the Interface between Innovation projects (emerging organizations) and their hostcorporations (existing organizations). The model calls attention to waysIn which management's actions create moreor less Independence between Innovation and hostorganization systems. Analyzing Interviews from 13 Innovation projects In two Fortune 500 corporations, everyday actions that loosen and couple Innovation and management systems are Identified. Find-Ings offer new ways of conceptualizing and managing this Important Interface. Entrepreneurial organizations have been described as "emerging organizations," and have been contrasted with organizational behavior or "existing organizations" (Gartner, Bird & Starr, 1992). In the case of corporate entrepreneurship, the emerging organizations (innovation projects) are embedded in existing host organizations so that the interface of the two organizational systems must be managed. Recent reviews of product development research concur that more research-base knowledge has been generated on innovation systems, or projects, than on the interface of projects and host organizations (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1995, Leonard-Barton, 1992). Yet this interface is an important aspect of product development because it is the arena wherein the marrying of innovation to established organizational capabilities and strategies is consummated. MODELS OF THE INNOVATION PROJECTIHOST ORGANIZATION INTERFACEExistent images of the project/host organization interface tend to focus on either the project or the organization, rather than the relationship between the two. The dominant model of how synergies between innovation projects and host organizations are created is the "bottom up" or strategic forcing model. In this process, the innovation is, forcibly, fitted into the resisting organization and strategy. The "champion" (Schon, 1963) or "heavy-weight" (Clark & Fujimoto, 1990) project leader uses a mix of political power,

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