Business model innovation (BMI) is a key performance driver for startups. Nonetheless, the reality is that new firms with new business models still face survival pressures. New institutional theory shows that legitimacy factors will affect the performance level of new ventures. Legitimacy is an important subject in the field of institution and organization, which refers to the extent to which an individual or organization’s behavior is accepted by the public and reflects the important influence of external institutional forces on the organization. Consequently, this study collected data from entrepreneurs in Eastern China and conducted a regression analysis, which revealed that novelty-based and efficiency-based business model innovation positively affects the performance of startups. Moreover, this study found that different dimensions of external legitimacy have different effects on the relationship between business model innovation and the performance of startups. Regulative legitimacy and normative legitimacy negatively regulate the relationship between novelty-based business model innovation and the performance of startups. In contrast, normative legitimacy positively regulates the relationship between efficiency-based business model innovation and the performance of startups. The study also found that cognitive legitimacy positively regulates the relationship between novelty-based business model innovation and the performance of startups. In summary, the study highlights the importance of considering the influence of different dimensions of external legitimacy on the relationship between business model innovation and the performance of startups. The findings suggest that legitimacy is a crucial factor affecting startups’ ability to improve their performance through business model innovation.

At present, the external environment is full of crises and challenges. The practice of firms deploying slack resources in advance and actively coping with external disturbances has achieved good effect. But, the theoretical research process of organizational slack is relatively slow compared with practice. Therefore, this paper comprehensively applied a bibliometric method and traditional literature review method to carry out scientific econometric analysis on 958 papers from the WoS database. We visualized the results as knowledge maps and analyzed papers with the help of the knowledge graph. The research venation and evolution trend of organizational slack are sorted out from a longitudinal perspective. On this basis, we put forward the future development direction of organizational slack in line with emerging phenomena, mainly including: ① Clarifying the sources of organizational slack; ② Two new dimensions of defensiveness slack and strategic slack are proposed from functional attributes; ③ Based on the perspective of active response, we expand the research depth of firms to construct organizational resilience through organization slack to adapt to uncertain environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide new ideas for firms to make plans before turbulence occurs in highly uncertain environments. It provides a useful reference for the future development of organizational slack research and promotes the formation of a virtuous cycle of mutual promotion between theory and practice.