We examine how external endorsements help new ventures with varying degrees of innovativeness to attract funding. According to optimal distinctiveness theory, new ventures should be as different from competitors as legitimately possible. However, initial research suggests that new ventures can also buffer their legitimacy through external endorsements. We clarify that effects of such legitimacy buffers depend critically on an audience's unique legitimacy-distinctiveness relationship. Specifically, external endorsements lead to different predictions about shifts in optimal distinctiveness for return-seeking audiences compared to novelty-seeking audiences as relevant new venture funders. For return-seeking audiences, new ventures are perceived as less legitimate when they are non-innovative or radically innovative so that incrementally innovative new ventures are most attractive without endorsements. External endorsements can thus buffer the legitimacy of non-innovative and radically innovative new ventures, but they lead to different performance implications for a return-seeking audience. While non-innovative new ventures increase their attractiveness, only radically innovative new ventures can become optimally distinctive and outperform other distinctiveness configurations. In contrast, novelty-seeking audiences already have a higher tolerance for radically innovative new ventures, so the effects of external endorsements are less pronounced. Four empirical studies, using observational data and experiments in equity and reward-based crowdfunding, provide strong support for this theory and account for alternative explanations such as risk perceptions. In turn, we shed new light on the crucial, audience-specific function of external endorsements, namely, as a means to alter optimal distinctiveness levels.

我们研究外部认可如何帮助具有不同创新程度的新企业吸引资金。根据最优独特性理论，新企业应尽可能合法地与竞争对手不同。然而，初步研究表明，新企业也可以通过外部认可来缓冲其合法性。我们澄清，这种合法性缓冲的效果很大程度上取决于受众独特的合法性-独特性关系。具体来说，与寻求新奇的受众作为相关的新风险投资人相比，外部认可导致对寻求回报的受众的最佳独特性变化的不同预测。对于寻求回归的观众来说，当新企业非创新或激进创新时，人们会认为其合法性较低，因此，渐进式创新的新企业在没有认可的情况下最具吸引力。因此，外部认可可以缓冲非创新和激进创新新企业的合法性，但它们会给寻求回报的受众带来不同的绩效影响。虽然非创新性的新企业增加了吸引力，但只有彻底创新的新企业才能达到最佳的独特性并超越其他独特性配置。相比之下，追求新奇的受众已经对彻底创新的新企业有了更高的容忍度，因此外部认可的效果不太明显。四项实证研究，使用观察数据和基于股权和奖励的众筹实验，为这一理论提供强有力的支持，并解释风险认知等替代解释。反过来，我们对外部认可的关键的、特定于受众的功能有了新的认识，即作为改变最佳独特性水平的一种手段。